AMD announces refreshed Ryzen 8040 'Hawk Point' mobile chips and the excitement is, well, not particularly exciting

pcgamer.com:

After months of speculation and the odd leak, AMD has finally announced the first models in its new lineup of processors to feature the Ryzen 8000 branding at its Advancing AI event in San Jose, California. Specifically, a raft of new mobile chips under the codename «Hawk Point'' were unveiled, although those of you expecting something particularly exciting may be left wanting.

These new chips will still use the same Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 GPU architecture as the previous generation, but AMD says the new Ryzen 8040 processors can deliver up to a 1.4X increase in AI workloads compared to the previous Phoenix 7040 series thanks to an updated on-die dedicated accelerator AMD refers to as the Neural Processing Unit, or NPU. Otherwise the core counts and frequencies remain mostly the same, apart from some models that actually appear to have reduced specs compared to the equivalent current generation chips. 

Even as refreshes go this seems to be something of a damp squib, as scrolling through the line-up there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of change from the previous chips beyond the claimed improvement in AI performance. There appears to be little difference between the top of the line Ryzen 9 8945HS and its predecessor, the 7940HS, as both still feature eight cores, 16 threads, and a 5.2GHz boost frequency. 

Further down the stack some of the lesser models actually feature lower base clock frequencies compared to their previous generation cousins, and while this might deliver slightly better power efficiency than the previous chips it's a little disappointing to see what is essentially a downgrade in some specs compared to the outgoing generation. 

When it comes to APU gaming performance, AMD's slides indicate that