According to a new report, AMD may streamline its mobile CPU brand names by discontinuing the HS, H, and U designations for its 15-45W TDP (Thermal Design Power) chips.
Instead, the designation will be changed to the ‘Ryzen AI’ name starting with the upcoming Zen 5 Strix Point processor generation, according to Weibo (reported by igor'sLAB). There are several reasons AMD could be making such a bold move for the branding of its mobile chips, with the biggest one being to promote a better understanding of the tech giant’s products.
Simplifying the old branding to ‘Ryzen AI’ makes it easier for consumers and partners to know a chip’s classification, instead of needing to memorize several unrelated letters. Ryzen AI also allows for different performance levels to be covered under the 15-14W range. And using ‘AI’ in the new brand demonstrates that AMD is committing itself to AI-powered APUs.
The report states that certain branding will remain the same. For instance, the “successor to the Ryzen 7040 ‘Phoenix’ series (HS/H) will be called ‘Ryzen AI HX’.” It also clarifies that because the transition to this new branding may cause initial confusion, AMD will provide information and tools to allow for a clearer understanding and breakdown of how the new naming system will work.
Strix Point will mix things up
A shiny new name designation for the chips powering the upcoming Strix Point isn’t the only thing the new APUs have to look forward to, to go by the rumors surrounding it. An engineering sample had been reportedly benched through Blender, revealing a score of 270.92, which means that a mobile CPU beat out two desktop processors — the Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
There was another rumor claiming some surprising specs for an Asus laptop that would feature a Strix Point APU, specifically the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 that has 12 cores and 24 threads, an NPU running at 77 TOPs (trillions of operations per second), a boost clock of up to 5.1GHz, and 36MB of L3 cache.
But the move to AI could mean some users getting left behind. Another rumor claims that the upcoming APUs will drop support for Windows 10. Despite the OS being far more popular than Windows 11, the latter is tailor-made for AI, while the much older Windows 10 would definitely struggle with components that use it.
It seems that, if even half of these rumors and reports turn out to be true, Strix Point will be an interesting turning point for AMD in terms of both aesthetics and performance.
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