Rumored Ryzen 9 5900HX Zen 3 Beast CPU May Bring Serious AMD Gaming Laptop Muscle
There is an interesting development in the land of leaks, which pertains to AMD's upcoming mobile Ryzen 5000 series. I emphasize "mobile" because AMD has already launched its desktop Ryzen 5000 series, based on its Zen 3 CPU architecture. Zen 3 will eventually find its way to laptops, and over at Geekbench (where else?), there is a new entry for a never-before referenced Ryzen 9 5900HX SKU.
What makes this latest entry so curious is not the fact that it is an unreleased mobile part—there have been several leaks of those already. However, the "HX" suffix is new one to us, and one plausible explanation is that it refers to an unlocked multiplier, for enthusiast and gaming laptops with overclocking capabilities. Perhaps, anyway.
The "H" suffix already exists within AMD's mobile lineup, and it refers to the company's high-performance laptop CPUs. For example, the Ryzen 7 4800H (as found in Dell's G5 15 SE) is an 8-core/16-thread processor with a 45W TDP, and is found inside performance laptops. Here is how the suffix options break down...
- HX = ???
- H = high performance (typically 45W TDP)
- HS = also high performance, but with a lower TDP (typically 35W TDP)
- U = standard part (typically 15W TDP)
We can reasonably surmise that the Ryzen 9 5900HX (assuming the chip is real) is a high-performance part, because of the "H" designation. The "X" designation adds more to the mix—probably an unlocked multiplier, or maybe an even higher TDP for additional clocks/performance.
Anyway, here is the listing...
Click to Enlarge (Source: Geekbench)
According to the listing, the unannounced CPU resides inside an ASUS ROG Zephyrus GX551QS laptop. it has 8 cores and 16 threads, with a 3.3GHz base clock and 4.6GHz boost clock, along with 16MB of L3 cache. For reference, the current generation Ryzen 9 4900H has 8 cores and 16 threads, with a 3.3GHz base clock and 4.4GHz max boost clock, and half the L3 cache (8MB).
So another remote possibility is that the "X" suffix could represent more cache. That is probably not the case, though, because previous leaks indicate that other next-gen mobile CPUs without the X suffix will have 16MB of cache as well, like the Ryzen 7 5800U.
Additionally, this will probably end up being a Cezanne part, meaning it is based on Zen 3. Rumor has it AMD will split is Ryzen 5000 series into Zen 3 (Cezanne) and Zen 2 (Lucienne) parts, which I think will be needlessly confusing, but it is what it is.
As to the performance, it posted a 1,429 single-core score and 6,912 multi-core score. One of the most recent entries for a Ryzen 9 4900H, which resides inside an ASUS TUF Gaming laptop, has it posting a 1,176 single-core score and 6,733 multi-core score.
This is all early data, of course, so do not read too much into the results. The bigger takeaway here is that AMD could have a new suffix under its sleeve, and it will be interesting to see what exactly it is used for.
