AMD's 2025 laptop plans sure do include a lot of refreshed and rebranded APUs, but who cares when you've got Fire Range, Strix Halo, and four RDNA 4 mobile GPUs heading our way next year
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
Read more on pcgamer.com
