The 6 Coolest Laptop CPUs Of 2021 (So Far)

A look at the coolest CPUs that are pushing the limit for laptops with faster clock speeds, bigger caches and other features for consumer, commercial, workstation and gaming segments.

It’s Mainly Intel Vs. AMD In 2021, For Now

It’s halfway through the year, and the market for laptop processors is more competitive than ever.

That competition is mainly between Intel, the dominant provider of laptop CPUs, and AMD, which is giving Intel a serious challenge with the company’s Ryzen brand. Intel, on the other hand, continues to hold the claim for fastest clock speeds, even as AMD says its CPUs can best Intel’s in single-threaded performance thanks to new architectural improvements.

Both semiconductor companies have released multiple new families of processors this year while Apple has yet to announce or release the successor to last year’s M1. Qualcomm also has been quiet so far about the follow-up to last year’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 5G, though the company’s new CEO, Cristiano Amon, said he intends to best Apple and others in the future with a new chip design.

What follows are the six coolest laptop CPUs that have been announced or released in 2021 so far, which includes top-performing processors like Intel’s Core i7 and AMD’s Ryzen 9.

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Intel Core i7-1195G7

The Intel Core i7-1195G7 is the new flagship CPU from the company’s 11th-generation Core U-Series for ultrathin laptops. Intel revealed the new processor in May, saying that it can deliver up to 5GHz on a single core in turbo mode and outpaces AMD’s top Ryzen 7 5800U across multiple games and content creation applications.

For instance, Intel said the new Core i7-1195G7 can provide 46-178 percent faster performance across games ranging from Fortnite to Valheim compared to AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800U. In addition, the company said the new Core i7 is 93 percent faster for video editing, 82 percent faster for DaVinci Resolve, 156 percent faster for Cyberlink Power Director, 136 percent faster for Adobe Lightroom Photo Merge and 98 percent faster for Adobe Premiere Pro Scene Detect.

The Core i7-1195G7 comes with four cores, eight threads, a 2.9GHz base frequency, a 5GHz single-core turbo frequency, a 4.6GHz all-core turbo frequency, a 12 MB cache, 96 graphics execution units and a 1.4GHz graphics frequency. It supports DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4x-4267 memory types as well as PCIe 4.0 and Thunderbolt 4.0 connectivity.

Intel Core vPro i9-11950H

The Intel Core vPro i9-11950H is the new flagship vPro CPU from the company’s 11th generation of mobile workstation processors. The company said the new Core vPro i9-11950H can provide double-digit performance gains ranging from 11-29 percent over its 10th-generation Core vPro i9-10885H. When compared to the ninth-generation Core vPro i7-9850H, the new Core vPro i9’s gains grow to 24-75 percent. The benchmarks covered workloads for financial services, product development, single-threaded compute and multi-threaded compute.

The vPro features include Intel Hardware Shield, a set of silicon-level security features that protects the system underneath and above the BIOS level and uses GPU resources to perform advanced threat detection workloads, lowering the strain on the CPU. The other vPro features are Intel Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, which is meant to protect against common malware attacks; Intel Active Management Technology with Intel Endpoint Management Assistant, which enables remote management and maintenance at the BIOS level; and Intel Total Memory Encryption, which enables encryption of the entire system memory.

The Core vPro i9-11950H comes with eight cores, 16 threads, a 2.6GHz base frequency, a 5GHz two-core turbo frequency, a 4.5GHz all-core turbo frequency, a 24 MB L3 cache and a 1,450MHz maximum integrated graphics frequency. It supports up to 3200 MT/s in memory bandwidth, up to 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0 and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.

Intel Core i9-11980HK

The Intel Core i9-11980HK is the new flagship CPU from the company’s 11th-generation Core H-Series for mobile workstations. The company said the new CPU can best AMD’s new Ryzen 5900HX CPU across multiple games and in video creation, photo processing and Microsoft Office workloads.

Compared to AMD’s eight core Ryzen 9 5900HX, Intel’s new flagship, eight-core Core i9-11980HK consumer CPU can improve frames per second from 11-26 percent for popular games like Total War: Three Kingdoms and GRID 2019, according to tests run by Intel. It was also up 14 percent faster for Office applications, 18 percent faster for Adobe After Effects video editing and 24 percent faster for Adobe Photoshop Elements photo editing, Intel said.

The Core Core i9-11980HK comes with eight cores, 16 threads, a 2.6GHz base frequency, a 5GHz two-core turbo frequency, a 4.5GHz all-core turbo frequency, a 24 MB L3 cache and a 1,450MHz maximum integrated graphics frequency. It supports up to 3200 MT/s in memory bandwidth, up to 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0 and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800U

The AMD Ryzen 7 5800U is the new flagship CPU from the company’s Ryzen 5000 U-Series processors for ultrathin laptops.

Compared to Intel’s 11th-generation Core i7-1185G7, AMD said its Ryzen 7 provides 18 percent better content creation performance, 44 percent better video encoding performance, 7 percent better office application performance and 39 percent better design and visualization performance.

Thanks to the major improvement in single-threaded performance from the CPU’s Zen 3 architecture, AMD showed that the Ryzen 7 5800U narrowed or closed the gap with Intel’s Core i7-1165G7 or even exceeded its competitor for office productivity. The largest gains were seen with a 23 percent improvement in the PCMark10 benchmark, a 22 percent improvement in Microsoft Excel performance, a 9 percent improvement in the PCMark Apps benchmark and a 7 percent improvement in Microsoft Edge performance.

The Ryzen 7 5800U comes with eight cores, 16 threads, a 1.9GHz base frequency, a 4.4GHz turbo frequency and a 20 MB cache. It supports DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4-4266 memory types as well as PCIe 3.0 connectivity.

AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U

The AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U is the new flagship CPU from the company’s Ryzen Pro 5000 series of enterprise-grade processors for ultrathin commercial laptops.

When comparing the Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U to Intel’s Core i7-1185G7, AMD’s new flagship enterprise chip is 3 percent slower based on the Cinebench R20 single-thread benchmark, according to AMD, but the processor excels by other measures. For the Cinebench R20 multi-thread and Passmark 10 CPU Mark benchmarks, Ryzen Pro 7 showed a 65 percent improvement. On the Geekbench v5 benchmark for multi-core applications, the Ryzen Pro 7 was 48 percent faster.

As for real-world performance, AMD showed that the Ryzen 7 Pro was 7 percent faster using the Microsoft Office PCMark 10 applications benchmark, 23 percent faster in Microsoft Excel, 4 percent faster in Microsoft PowerPoint and 19 percent faster for starting applications. For Microsoft Word and Microsoft Edge, AMD showed a tie between the Ryzen 7 Pro and Intel’s Core i7.

The processor comes with a set of security, manageability and stability features, known collectively as AMD Pro Technologies, that AMD says goes “toe-to-toe” with Intel vPro. The new security features include AMD Shadow Stack, a new silicon-based protection against a type of malware known as control-flow hijacking. The CPU also supports integration with Microsoft’s Secured-core PC feature in Windows 10 as well as FIPS 140-3 encryption certification for the Ryzen Pro’s AMD Secure Processor.

The Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U comes with eight cores, 16 threads, a 1.9GHz base frequency, a boost frequency of up to 4.4GHz and a 20 MB cache. It supports DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4-4266 memory types as well as PCIe 3.0 connectivity.

AMD Ryzen 9 5980HX

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is the new flagship CPU from the company’s Ryzen 5000 H-Series processors for gaming laptops.

When compared to Intel’s Core i9-10980HK, the Ryzen 9 5900HX is 14 percent faster in single-threaded performance using the Cinebench R20 1T benchmark, 37 percent faster in overall performance using the Passmark PT10 benchmark and 21 percent faster in game physics performance using the 3DMark Fire Strike Physics benchmark, according to the company.

The Ryzen 9 5980HX consists of eight cores, 16 threads, a 3.3 GHz base frequency, a 4.8 GHz boost frequency, a 20MB cache and a 45-watt TDP. It supports DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4-4266 memory types as well as PCIe 3.0 connectivity. For select OEM systems, the processor is unlocked for overclocking.