Want to Grok AMD’s Next-Gen Ryzen Laptop CPUs? You’ll Need a Decoder Wheel

pcmag.com:

Telling AMD Ryzen CPUs apart (or for that matter, Intel Core ones) simply by numbers and names is tough enough: Core i9-12900K? How does that stack up to a Ryzen 9 5950X? It’s especially tricky with mobile processors, which tend to get less attention—and have more esoteric tiers and nuances related to power consumption, and the like—than their rock-star desktop counterparts.

AMD is aiming to make things easier with its next-generation processors, with a refinement, for starters, to how it names its chips designed for laptops. But ironically, know the old saw of “needing a decoder ring” to interpret technical jargon? It just slipped over into the real world as part of AMD's move. Behold the AMD Ryzen Mobile CPU Decoder. (Our term, not AMD’s.)

These wheels are just gimmicks for the press, a sort of Pantone kit for processor geeks. You won’t find one in every Best Buy attached to the shelves on a chain, like color swatches or a guide to paint hues at your local home center. (Though maybe you should, if you ask us!) But at its recent Ryzen Tech Day in Austin, Texas, AMD used them as props to brief PCMag and a select group of other journalists on coming changes to how it names its mobile processors.

Now, note that AMD hasn’t shared anything major about its next-generation Ryzen chips for mobile devices; the latest laptop chips, the Ryzen 6000 series dubbed “Rembrandt,” just hit the market earlier in 2022. (See our first tests of a laptop with a Ryzen 6000-series mobile chip.) What we do know: The new families, when they do hit the market in 2023 laptops, will be split into lower-power “Phoenix” models (what are typically thought of as the U-series), and higher-power “Dragon Range” chips (the various H-series classifications,