Ahhhh Dr. Lisa Su, we’ve missed you! AMD has just taken the stage at this year’s CES 2022 which kicked off this week in Las Vegas and also online. The tech expo has gone digital again as the world still battles with various COVID variants springing up. But enough about that, you’re here for AMD!

Well, AMD brought new laptop tech to the show, going head to head against Intel’s current top-spec processors. AMD’s offering, the Ryzen 6000 line of laptop CPUs are using their Zen 3+ core architecture. AMD is also claiming some wonderful power advantages, not only in performance thanks to their 5Ghz but also in their wild battery lives of next-gen laptops. 24-hour battery lives while playing video? If that’s true… wow!

Gaming was also brought to the forefront of AMD’s keynote, with RDNA 2 built-in graphics coming as standard and claimed it was the world’s first on-chip graphics that can PC games in HD at smooth framerates. It removes the need for dedicated graphics cards inside of laptops, which in turn should bring the price of laptops down too, as people aren’t paying for an overpriced graphics card. It also means that these new gaming focussed laptops can be thinner than before, turning them into sleek pieces of kit, rather than the current hulks we see in the gaming world today. We also can’t forget that AMD Freesync exists either which can also help to smooth out gameplay.

As cheeky as AMD are, they took shots at Intel, by showing graphs of different games performing on a 6800U compared to an i7-1165G7, and of course the results were in AMD’s favour. 303% better playing Doom Eternal at 1080p Low, 146% better playing CS:GO at 1080p Ultra and so on. Marketing wizardry? Of course, we have to take these numbers with a pinch of salt. But let’s wait until the laptops start launching. Then we’ll have a test on our hands won’t we. Apparently they’re expected to come in February this year, so fingers crossed we can get our hands on one.

Oh, AMD also introduced their budget-friendly 6500XT graphics card, retailing at $199. But again, there are snakes out there, that will probably snipe those up pretty quick, so let’s say the price will probably be closer to $400 by the time the scalpers inflate their prices.

AMD is also bringing a new styled upscaling software, Super Resolution to the market. I doubt it’ll hit the performance of DLSS or FSR, but it’s nice that they’re trying to squeeze as much power out of their architecture. It’s switched on at driver-level too so should be pretty easy to implement into systems.

And finally, AMD is refreshing their popular 5800X with the 5800X 3D which means it comes with AMD’s 3D V-Cache. It essentially increases the cache of your processor and offers less latency which equates to better gaming performance.

So, not quite the CES 2022 we’d expected. We wanted to see something from AMD’s desktop graphics card lineup and maybe some more from the 7000 series desktop chips and Zen 4. We got a preview of what’s to come, but no real information. It’s a 5nm processor and it’s currently running in AMD’s labs. We’ll have to wait for the second half of 2022 before more information is dropped. Oh well. Good news for you laptop people out there!

Thanks for watching!