AMD’s Ryzen 9 6900HX Zen 3+ APU May Have A Radeon 600 Series Surprise On Board
It is widely expected that AMD will introduce some new processors at or around the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week, as it has a livestream planned for the day before the event kicks off. If a recent leak is true, a new line of APUs will be among the announcements, with some interesting details emerging about AMD's Ryzen 9 6900HX.
That model does not officially exist. However, rumor has it the chip will headline AMD's Ryzen 6000 series APUs that are purportedly on the horizon. These are the parts we have seen in past leaks with the codename Rembrandt, and they are expected to pair upgraded Zen 3+ cores built on a 6-nanometer manufacturing processor with RDNA 2 graphics.
These will replace the Ryzen 5000H series (Cezanne), which pairs 7nm Zen 3 CPU cores with the same Vega-based iGPU as the 4000 series. So the jump to RDNA 2 will be most welcome when Rembrandt hits the ground running.
According to what WCCTech is hearing from its unnamed sources, the Ryzen 9 6900X will be an 8-core/16-thread chip with a 4.6GHz max boost clock, 16MB of L3 cache, and 4MB of L2 cache. What about stacked 3D V-cache? Apparently that is not in the cards for Rembrandt, and won't be added to AMD's laptop offers for a "few more generations."
Even so, the jump to 6nm should yield some power efficiency gains, at least in theory. The supposed max boost clock is the same as it is for the Ryzen 9 5900HX, but it's possible the Ryzen 9 6900HX will be able to maintain its boost for a longer period of time. We'll see.
The other upgrade is a move to DDR5-4800 memory. It's not clear if DDR4 memory will be supported as well, just as Alder Lake plays nice with both, but the added bandwidth could bring a nice performance bump to next-gen laptops. Same goes for the integrated graphics.
To that end, AMD is supposedly introducing a new Radeon RX 600M branding for its RDNA 2 graphics in mobile form. The version that will be part of the Ryzen 9 6900HX is said to be a Radeon RX 680M. Detailed specifications have not leaked out, but between the jump in architecture (from Vega) and the shift to DDR5, this is shaping up to be a powerful APU for gaming.
It's also said that high-end gaming laptops will still lean on NVIDIA's discrete mobile Ampere GPUs, though. Leaks suggest the Ryzen 9 6900HX will be paired with GPUs like the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti at the upper end.
More information will be shared at CES, but if things play out the way the leaks suggest, gaming laptops are about to level up in a big way.
