Amid the fanfare over AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 Mobile chips, you might have missed one important detail: Some of the new CPUs use older technology, and it’s hard to tell which ones they are.
The majority of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Mobile family of chips are built around the company’s Zen 3 architecture—the same architecture underlying the latest Ryzen 5000 desktop processors, which we called the “best consumer CPU we’ve ever seen.â€� However, a small group is based on the older Zen 2 architecture instead. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that—the Zen 2-based mobile Ryzen 4000 series crushed Intel’s H-series processors in our earlier tests—the fact that AMD isn’t labeling them as such is like finding out the bottle of champagne you just bought is actually filled with beer.Â