AMD Teases Powerful 'Dragon Range' Laptop CPUs for 2023

pcmag.com:

To win the PC gaming laptop market, AMD is preparing a new mobile CPU family for next year that’s designed to offer “extreme gaming” performance.

AMD teased the upcoming “Dragon Range” processors on Tuesday with select media outlets after the company’s earnings call. The chipmaker also released an updated roadmap for its CPU plans, which show Dragon Range will be built using AMD’s upcoming Zen 4 architecture.

Other features include support for DDR5 RAM, PCIe Gen 5.0, and a power draw at more than 55 watts. Expect Dragon Range to appear in laptops thicker than 20mm or 0.78 inches in size. 

The roadmap also notes Dragon Range is aiming to achieve “mobile gaming dominance” in the market by featuring the “highest core, thread and cache ever for a mobile gaming CPU.” This suggests the chips will use AMD's chip-stacking 3D V-Cache technology, which is already rolling out in the desktop Ryzen 5800X3D CPU. 

The upcoming chip family is bound to pose a threat to Intel's H-series mobile processors, which have appeared in the most powerful gaming laptops.

For smaller notebooks, AMD is preparing the “Phoenix” mobile CPU family, which will draw less power at between 35 to 45 watts. The chips will also rely on LPDDR5 memory, but will still be built with the Zen 4 architecture and support PCIe Gen 5.0. 

The roadmap also suggests both Dragon Range and Phoenix will arrive in the beginning of next year. For desktop users, AMD is preparing “Raphael,” the codename for the upcoming Ryzen 7000 CPU series, which is slated to arrive later this year, probably around September. These chips will also use the Zen 4 architecture and support DDR 5 and PCIe Gen 5.0.

AMD will probably talk more about Dragon Range and Phoenix in January during the