Of the scores of industries that the COVID-19 pandemic has upended, the PC industry is one of the few that looks to emerge significantly better off than it was in the "before times." Shipments of PCs are already up significantly, transformed seemingly overnight from a stagnant technology being pushed aside by smartphones to an essential tool for an era of learning and working from home. And that era looks to be long-lasting, if not permanent.
If the second personal computing revolution is going to stick, though, it needs worthy hardware. Key component manufacturers—notably, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia—have sensed this. At CES 2021 this week, they introduced dozens of new graphics processors, mobile and desktop CPUs, and other chips to boost the capabilities of PCs introduced this year.
Shopping for a new laptop or desktop (or searching for parts to build one) has always been time-consuming and thick with jargon. But now that more people are doing it, it’s worth taking a closer look at what all of the CES 2021 chip announcements mean for PC shoppers this year.
Laptops and Intel: A Cornucopia of New Silicon
If you’re in the market for any kind of laptop, whether it’s a simple Chromebook for classwork or a beefy gaming rig, you'll want to wrap your head around new processor families that AMD and Intel unveiled at CES 2021. Let’s start with Intel, which introduced a handful of new mobile CPUs built on the company’s long-delayed 10-nanometer (10nm) production process. It promises performance and efficiency gains to significantly speed up tasks and increase battery life. Other new chips employ older processes but bring power to high-end notebooks.
'Jasper Lake' at the Low End, and 'Tiger Lake' Adds vPro
For Chromebook and other budget-PC shoppers, Intel unveiled new Pentium Silver and Celeron processors. Once the unexciting backwater of PC silicon, these entry-level chips are in high demand now that budget PCs are flying off the shelves for grade-school students and casual second- or third-laptop use. They’ll bring a 35% performance improvement over their predecessors, Intel claims. They will face off in Chromebooks with some new, Chromebook-specific Ryzen chips from rival AMD. (More on those in a moment.)
The first of the 11th Generation ("Tiger Lake") of mobile chips rolled out late in 2020, destined for consumer and small-business laptops. If you’re lucky enough to have your large employer send you a new business laptop to use while working remotely in 2021, know that corporate-minded 11th Gen chips are coming, too. You’ll want to see if any Intel-based machine from mid-2021 onward has one of Intel’s latest 11th Generation Core vPro processors. While 11th Generation chips have been around for a few months, at CES 2021 Intel finally introduced versions with vPro and other security and manageability features that IT departments care about. That will spur their appearance in the traditional business-laptop brands.
The new chips promise 20% better overall performance than the previous generation, and an even larger improvement on work-from-home multitasking (like simultaneously videoconferencing and editing a document).
'Tiger Lake' H35 Series: More Power for Gamers and Creators
Finally, gaming enthusiasts will want to keep their eyes on more than a dozen new laptops expected to be equipped with the latest Core H-series Tiger Lake Intel processors. The company offered a sneak peak at three of the members of the new 11th Generation H35 family this week, including the Core i7-11375H. That one is a quad-core chip with Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0, which can increase the frequency of a single core to 5GHz. (Good single-core performance is important to ensuring many demanding AAA games run smoothly.)
Identifying whether a laptop has one of these latest chips can be difficult, since Intel nomenclature tends to be vast and varied. The best bet is to ensure that the number "11" is somewhere in the chip name, which signifies that it comes from the latest (11th Generation) family.
Laptops and AMD: The 'Cezanne' Ryzen 5000 Line Looks Like a Disrupter
Plenty of laptop shoppers will want to consider AMD chips, as well, which in some cases may prove to be more capable than their Intel competitors.
That looks to be the case with many of the AMD Ryzen 5000-series laptop processors that AMD unveiled at CES, which feature some gaudy core and thread counts, as well as what looks like improved power efficiency. Most of these use AMD's Zen 3 architecture, the same underpinnings that brought the company's Ryzen desktop processors to the front of the line with the most recent generation late in 2020.
Ryzen 5000 Mobile: The H and the U
The Ryzen 5000 "Cezanne" launch was really two launches, that of a three-tiered "H-Series" of chips that are designed for more powerful, and generally larger and thicker laptops, and the more mainstream "U-series," designed for thin-and-light machines. That is in contrast to Intel's Tiger Lake-H launch above, which saw the two types of chips of that generation debut at different times.
Chief among the new mobile Ryzens are the Ryzen 9 HX models destined for top-shelf gaming and content-creation laptops. These include the Ryzen 9 5900HX, which has a 4.6GHz boost clock speed, and the Ryzen 9 5980HX, which takes it up another notch, to 4.8GHz. Both processors feature eight cores and 16 threads, and they come unlocked for overclocking. Lesser but still powerful "HS" (35-watt, lower power) and "H" chips come in Ryzen 9, 7, and 5 varieties; the Ryzen 9 and 7 chips employ eight cores and 16 threads, while the Ryzen 5 CPUs are six-core/12-thread.
Shoppers in the market for a mainstream laptop who want an alternative to Intel’s 11th Generation chips should consider AMD’s new U-series chips. These are designed to offer proficient performance and long battery life in equal measures. The professed top dog among them is the Ryzen 7 5800U, an eight-core chip that AMD claims is the “fastest x86 processor in the world for thin and light notebooks." Intel's top equivalent Tiger Lake/11th Generation CPU doesn't top four cores.
One thing to note: Most, but not all, of the new Ryzen 5000 U-series are built on AMD's new Zen 3 architecture, but a couple of the new chips are Zen 2-based.
Ryzen C Series for Chromebooks, Plus Ryzen Pro
AMD also offers capable silicon to power Chromebooks and business laptops in the form, respectively, of C-series (special CPUs designed for Chromebooks) and Ryzen Pro processors. While these chip lines weren’t updated at CES (they debuted in 2020), they did receive makeovers in the last few months, so they’re broadly competitive with the Intel options mentioned above.
Several vendors at CES 2021 have also announced new Chromebooks based on Ryzen C CPUs, among them Acer (Chromebook Spin 514) and Asus (Chromebook Flip CM5). They join HP, which was the first adopter of Ryzen C in a Chromebook. So that trend is gaining momentum, and the Ryzen C chips should differentiate the generally bargain-basement AMD-based Chromebooks of years past (based on older A-series silicon) from these peppier offerings.
Gaming Laptops of All Kinds: Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series Is Here
Most laptop shoppers needn't look at graphics processing capabilities too closely. Most of the GPUs integrated into the new Intel and AMD chips (typically called Intel Iris Xe or AMD Radeon Graphics) will suffice for a wide range of mainstream computing tasks.
But hardcore gaming is an exception. For that, you’ll want to consider a new laptop that includes one of Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 3000 chips (also called the "RTX 30-Series"), unveiled at CES 2021 this week. These dedicated GPUs are the GeForce RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080.
All three have direct parallels in desktop GPUs. (Nvidia announced the desktop GeForce RTX 3060 at the show, too.) These are the core specs of the three new GPUs for laptops...
The sweet spot looks to be the RTX 3070. Nvidia says that it will power laptops starting at $1,300 and should offer 50% faster performance than the previous-generation mobile version of the RTX 2070.
Besides more capable silicon, one of the most significant advancements in the latest RTX GPUs is a refinement of the Max-Q technology that adapts the graphics chips to the cooling capabilities of thin-and-light gaming laptops. Expect the new GPUs to arrive in power laptops from all the major makers of gaming and content-creation PCs, including Alienware, Asus, Gigabyte, Lenovo, MSI, and Razer.
Desktop PCs and Intel: Intel 'Rocket Lake' Shoots for Gamer Bragging Rights
One of the most anticipated chip announcements from CES 2021 for desktop PC builders, upgraders, and gamers is Intel’s new 11th Generation "Rocket Lake" CPUs, which are built on the company’s first new desktop-chip architecture in five years (though still based on existing 14nm process technology for manufacture). The top-end Rocket Lakes will be semi-niche processors, aimed at enthusiasts building tricked-out gaming desktops with the ability to churn out silky-smooth frame rates even on the most demanding of titles.
There will be a whole family of Rocket Lake-based desktop chips, but Intel shared info, for now, on only one. Intel showed off a desktop PC with a Core i9-11900K, 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 running a beta version of the upcoming game Hitman 3 at a screen resolution of 1080p. It hit an average frame rate of around 130 frames per second (fps). That’s a 7% improvement over what the 10th Generation Core i9-10900K can offer, Intel says.
Intel plans to share more about the Rocket Lake family ahead of its launch sometime in March, but for now, all PC builders need to know is that they should consider it alongside AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000-series desktop chips, which offer similar capabilities and have shown equivalent or better gaming performance. Motherboards for the Rocket Lake chips should start to appear around the end of this month, and these boards, using 500-series chipsets, will work with existing "Comet Lake" (10th Generation) desktop CPUs, which debuted in 2020.
Note that if you do end up deciding to build a PC with Intel Core instead of Ryzen, you should be aware of the new capabilities of top-end Z590 motherboards, designed to take full advantage of Rocket Lake's capabilities. These new boards promise PCI Express 4.0 support and other incremental improvements, but opinions vary on whether they’ll actually be worth the upgrade. (Hit the link for our thoughts.)
Desktop PCs and AMD: Serious Content Creators Can Eye Threadripper Pro
While a lot of PC builders are looking to build gaming rigs, some want a powerful system to use for media editing, software development, or other resource-intensive tasks. If that’s you, you’ll be pleased to learn that AMD announced at CES 2021 its plans to sell Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors directly to consumers.
Previously only available in pre-built workstation desktops from Lenovo (late last year, we tested one of the chips in a ThinkStation model), some Threadripper Pro chips will be available at retailers starting in March. These include the Threadripper Pro 3995WX, which has a whopping 64 cores and a TDP of 280 watts. Such chips are overkill for pretty much any workaday computing task, but they are catnip for pro content creators who need unimpeachable accuracy in their calculations, such as in the architectural-design or scientific/data analysis fields. They’re suited mainly to people who know they need the vast numbers of cores and threads for complex tasks.
Of course, power users after maximum cores and threads, but who don't need the error-correcting memory and other features of the Pro line, can continue to look at "ordinary" third-generation Threadripper CPUs, which remain a current and imposing high-core-count option.
The Silicon of 2021: All the PCs 2021 Will Bring
With so many new chips unveiled at CES 2021, it stands to reason that the next few months will be an exciting time for PC innovation at a time when consumers need it the most. But the latest silicon advances won’t solve other problems that the COVID-19 pandemic created, chief among them manufacturing and supply challenges that have left many of last year’s hottest laptops sold out for weeks and months at a time.
Graphics-card shortages could also persist, though we don’t expect them to be as severe in 2021. Along with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, the latest cards from AMD and Nvidia unveiled last fall were some of the scarcest pieces of tech during the holiday shopping period. Laptops with the new RTX 3000-series GPUs unveiled at CES should be somewhat easier to find over the coming months.
Ultimately, whatever kind of PC you’re in the market for, there will soon be new silicon to power it, and the chips mentioned above will come to dominate their respective spec lists as 2021 progresses. That’s more important than ever in a stay-at-home world that’s likely to persist into 2021 and give us all the opportunity to get reacquainted with the PC as an essential, revolutionary piece of tech.
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