No one wants to spend more than they have to right now…meaning that it might have been an opportune time for AMD to debut its latest Ryzen 8000 Core HX mobile processors for gaming notebooks, which lack some of the features of the Ryzen 9000 series.
Essentially, the new Ryzen 8000 HX series, known as Dragon Range Refresh, is quite similar to the “Dragon Range” Ryzen 7000 HX series that AMD launched in January 2023, and should sit below the Ryzen 9 9955HX and Ryzen 9 9850HX AMD launched in conjunction with the Ryzen 9955HX3D this past January. All three of those latter chips used AMD’s Zen 5 architecture.
AMD
Both AMD’s Ryzen 7000 HX and the refreshed Ryzen 8000 HX parts both use the older Zen 4 architecture, however, and there’s no NPU, either. In fact, both the older Ryzen 7000 parts and the latest Ryzen 8000 HX series both feature processors with up to 16 cores and 32 threads and can be used in laptops with 45 to 75 watts of thermal design power, or TDP. (The default is 55W.) Both families use AMD’s TSMC’s 5nm process. One of the more significant changes AMD made has been to phase out the six-core Ryzen 5 7645HX for an 8-core Ryzen 7 8745HX.
The 8000HX Series is a refresh of the 7000HX Series with a few key differences in clock speeds and firmware, an AMD representative said in an email. “However, the 8000HX Series is intended to be paired with newer, more powerful discrete GPUs, and offers users more options for those looking to get into systems with the latest graphics,” he added.
AMD’s Ryzen 8000 HX series do include integrated graphics, though the Ryzen 610M inside the 8945HX and its two RDNA 2 graphics cores aren’t enough to serve as a gaming GPU, of course. Laptop makers will want to add a discrete GPU for that.
AMD’s new Ryzen 8000 HX chips will use DDR5 SODIMM memory and have 28 lanes of PCI Express 5.0 available.
Further reading: The best gaming laptops we’ve tested
This story was updated at 1:21 PM with additional comment from AMD.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.