Hopefully, this will mean a lot more vendors will offer AMD-based laptops next year, too.
It’s hard to believe that 2025 is only two months away now but with lots of new gaming PC stuff scheduled for release next year, it’s two months too long. If you were hoping for AMD to bring some of its desktop CPU magic to laptops, though, you might be disappointed to see that current plans point to a lot of refreshes and rebrands of current APUs. But countering them will be some seriously great gaming chips.
According to Wccftech, citing a now-removed video from Weibo user Golden Pig Upgrade Pack, the current Ryzen AI 300 series will still consist of Strix Point APUs—a CPU with up to four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c cores, and a GPU with 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units (CUs). However, they will be joined by a new chip, Kraken Point, that has all the hallmarks of being a partially disabled Strix Point processor. That’s because it just seems to have four fewer Zen 5c cores and CUs.
Even the new Ryzen AI 200 series of chips are just rebranded Hawk Point Ryzen 8040-series processors, with eight Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA 3 CUs. But it’s not all gloomy news, as AMD is planning on making laptop versions of its Ryzen 9000-series chips under the codename of Fire Range, including 3D V-Cache variants.
Just like the current Dragon Range, these will use the same chiplets as their desktop equivalents, just in a smaller package (and presumably with lower clocks and power limits). The Ryzen 9 7945HX is one heck of a gaming laptop CPU (as used in the Asus ROG Scar 17) so the Zen 5 version should be at least as good.
The real stars of the laptop show, however, will be the Strix Halo chips, though, aka Ryzen AI Max. We’ve covered leaks about the chips before but the specs are still worth mentioning again, especially in light of how disappointing the other ‘new’ APUs seem to be. The range will start with the lowly Ryzen AI Max Pro 380, with six Zen 5 cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs. At the other end of the scale is the AI Max+ 395, with 16 Zen 5 cores and 40 (yes, 40!) RDNA 3.5 CUs.
However, the video does add some additional information. Rather than extend the current naming scheme for integrated graphics in laptops (e.g. Radeon 780M and Radeon 890M), AMD will use Radeon 8060S and 8050S for 40 and 32 CU iGPU variations.
I understand why AMD felt the need to have a notably different name with these new graphics chips (the performance difference between a 780M and an 8050S will be huge, thanks in no small part to the 256-bit memory bus), but it’s just more confusion in AMD’s evermore complex nomenclature.
In that same video, there’s news about the next generation of discrete laptop GPUs from AMD, too. X user Everest (via Igor’s Lab) managed to grab a screenshot of a slide, before the video was taken down, that shows the current RX 7000M variants all being swapped for one of four ‘R25M’ chips, although there’s not an awful lot of information.
They will be (or should that say, hopefully be?) RDNA 4 GPUs and the lowest spec one will come with 8 GB of VRAM, on a 128-bit memory bus, with a 50 to 130 W power budget. I know that doesn’t sound spectacular but Nvidia’s lowest model laptop GPU is the RTX 4050, which just has 6 GB on a 96-bit memory bus.
Higher-end laptops will be served by an R25M variant sporting 16 GB of VRAM, a 256-bit memory bus, and up to 175 W of power. Without any words on the CU count and clock speeds, though, the details don’t tell us anything about performance. That said, I’d be surprised if they were lower than their equivalent RX 7000M models.
Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
All of this will be for nought if AMD can’t get laptop vendors to use its chips, though. If one browses through Newegg’s new laptop offers, discounting third-party sellers, around 50 models are sporting Intel CPUs and Nvidia RTX GPUs.
Searching again but this time for those with AMD CPUs shows just 11 models and only one of those has an AMD discrete laptop GPU. It’s a far better picture if one searches from any seller but trying to find one that houses a Radeon RX 7900M, for example, is a frustrating affair.
AMD has the goods for 2025, even if some of the new chips are just rehashes of older ones, now we just need more gaming laptop manufacturers to use them.
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