If you were hoping to see some seriously powerful gaming laptops driven by the next-in-line top-end mobile silicon from AMD and Intel later this year, those expectations might fail to be met, or at least that’s the latest gossip from the rumor mill.
Wccftech spotted that hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade – a source with a reasonable track record – made a comment on Weibo to the effect that there are no new high-end mobile processors coming this year.
That statement pertained to the future Xiaomi Redmi G Pro laptop refresh, which will have a high-end (HX series) Intel Arrow Lake CPU, but Wccftech points out that the comment refers to launches across the board. So, in theory that also includes AMD’s incoming Strix Point family of mobile processors (to some extent – we’ll come back to that).
In short, the most powerful laptop CPUs will remain Intel’s top-end Raptor Lake Refresh (HX) and AMD’s Dragon Range HX (alongside Hawk Point below that) for some time yet. At least in theory, as we should heap on the seasoning here.
Analysis: Intel delay seems quite possible
We can believe that Intel’s next HX series chips might be pushed to early 2025, and the same is true for AMD’s Strix Point Halo, the very beefiest versions of Strix Point processors. Indeed, there has already been speculation that Strix Point Halo will be delayed to 2025, so that makes sense (at least based on past rumors). Fire Range HX, the successor to Dragon Range, also isn’t rumored to debut until 2025.
However, we should still get vanilla Strix Point APUs for laptops (mixing Zen 5 with RDNA 3.5 graphics) in 2024, even though Wccftech appears to draw a broader conclusion here that Zen 5 mobile won't be arriving in 2024. Plain Strix Point will still be powerful notebook chips and should arrive late in the summer of 2024.
Zen 5 desktop will certainly be out at some stage later in 2024 – very likely before Arrow Lake desktop, according to rumors. Arrow Lake desktop is supposed to arrive late in 2024 from what we’ve heard, so having the laptop chips run slightly later, into early 2025, seems believable enough.
Still, we should be skeptical about all of this info as already noted.