AMD 'will highlight upcoming computing and graphics solutions' at CES on January 4

(Image credit: AMD)

As 2021 draws to a close, the eyes and ears of the tech world inevitably turn towards CES. On January 4th, AMD is scheduled to hold a virtual press conference. While CES can often be a little light on PC related reveals, this year is shaping up to be different as AMD, along with Intel and Nvidia, is expected to take the wraps off of a range of new products. Looking into the crystal ball, it appears as though AMD will announce, or at least discuss its 3D V-Cache CPUs, Rembrandt APUs and its entry level Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 GPUs. If we’re lucky, we might get some news on the status of Zen 4.

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On the mobile front, we can expect AMD to unveil its Ryzen 6000 mobile series CPUs. Codenamed Rembrandt, the CPU portion of the chips are based on the 6nm Zen3+ architecture featuring higher clocks and/or slightly improved power consumption over their 7nm Ryzen 5000 series stablemates. The really exciting part about about these chips is the long-awaited inclusion of RDNA 2 integrated graphics. This could deliver a rather dramatic speed up over the outgoing and ageing Vega graphics architecture.

We’ve seen several teases of AMD’s 3D V-Cache enabled CPUs which AMD claims can boost gaming performance by as much as 15%. These CPUs feature a stacked vertical cache. AMD demonstrated a prototype Ryzen 9 5900X with 192MB of L3 cache, a healthy increase over the 64MB of the base model. If these new CPUs really can deliver gains of 15% then can be considered more than just a refresh, so it's likely they will be named as the Ryzen 6000 series, and not receive the XT branding like we saw with the Ryzen 3000 series.

Finally, AMD is expected to reveal its entry level Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 GPUs. Though they’re not expected to set the world on fire with 4K 120fps performance, they will be very welcome additions to the GPU market that is starved of affordable GPUs.

The press conference is expected to be streamed via AMD.com on Tuesday, January 4 at 7 a.m. PT / 15:00 UK / 16:00 CET.

Chris' gaming experiences go back to the mid-nineties when he conned his parents into buying an 'educational PC' that was conveniently overpowered to play Doom and Tie Fighter. He developed a love of extreme overclocking that destroyed his savings despite the cheaper hardware on offer via his job at a PC store. To afford more LN2 he began moonlighting as a reviewer for VR-Zone before jumping the fence to work for MSI Australia. Since then, he's gone back to journalism, enthusiastically reviewing the latest and greatest components for PC & Tech Authority, PC Powerplay and currently Australian Personal Computer magazine and PC Gamer. Chris still puts far too many hours into Borderlands 3, always striving to become a more efficient killer.