Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Nvidia Corp. both expanded their consumer chip lineups today, respectively introducing new central processing units for laptops and a high-performance graphics card aimed at video game enthusiasts.

The companies debuted the newest additions to their portfolios at the virtual Consumer Electronics Show. Their announcements follow a Monday presentation by mutual competitor Intel Corp., which introduced a raft of processors for consumer and corporate laptops.

Intel can expect more competition in the laptop market from AMD, which today pulled back the curtains on no fewer than 13 new CPUs aimed at the portable computing market. The lineup is called the Ryzen 5000 Mobile series. The main improvement over AMD’s 2020 laptop chips is that the new processors use cores based on the company’s latest seven-nanometer Zen 3 architecture.

Zen 3 cores offer an average of 19% higher instructions per clock, a measure of how fast data is processed. They can provide the performance uplift without using more electricity than AMD’s  previous-generation cores. With the newly announced Ryzen 5000 Mobile, AMD has put both the Zen 3’s increased computing capacity and higher power efficiency to use.

The top-end chips in the lineup, which AMD refers to as the HX family, are optimized for performance and target laptops designed to run video games. The fastest HX-branded processor has 16 cores that together offer 23% better single-threaded speeds and up to 17% better multithreaded performance than last year’s chips. 

For machines that prioritize battery life, AMD’s chip engineers have developed the Ryzen 7 5800U. It takes advantage of the Zen 3’s power efficiency to let laptop makers build systems that can support up 17.5 hours of general usage and 21 hours of movie playback per charge. 

The other chips in the series strike varying balances between performance and efficiency, with core counts ranging from four to 16. AMD said that the first laptops featuring Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors will hit the market this quarter. 

Nvidia, in its separate CES keynote, debuted the RTX 3060 graphics processing unit for desktops. The headline feature is that the chip provides ten times the computing power of its predecessor for ray tracing, a technique used by video games to improve graphical fidelity. Ray tracing, which is used in the film industry as well, leverages simulated rays of light projected onto a virtual setting to produce more realistic lightning and shadow effects.

Likewise in the interest of boosting graphical fidelity, the RTX 3060 includes Tensor Cores, circuits optimized for artificial intelligence that Nvidia has carried over from its data center chip lineup. The chip uses the Tensor Cores to run a feature called Deep Learning Super Sampling. The feature allows the RTX 3060 to render only a portion of the pixels in a video game frame and generate the rest using a neural network, which is more efficient than rendering a frame pixel by pixel.  

The RTX 3060 is expected to become available in February starting at $329. 

Image: AMD