AMD reveals Zen 4 55W mobile CPUs for high-end gaming laptops
AMD delivers a closer look at its plans to create a set of powerful yet efficient 55W mobile processors, aimed toward high-end gaming laptops.
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AMD reveals Zen 4 mobile CPUs! AMD is set to release its 7000 series ‘Raphael’ CPUs sometime in the second half of 2022, and the new Zen 4 CPUs promise performance and efficiency, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. The reason these brand new CPUs are so efficient is all thanks to the new 5nm TSMC process the CPUs are built upon, making AMD the first-ever manufacturing company to have a CPU built on an nm process as little as 5nm.
We know a lot of information surrounding Zen 4 and AM5, and we have dedicated pages on both if you’d like to read more into them.
Mobile platform
The tech website XDA-developers has reported that AMD recently shared a closer look at its development roadmap, and this time it includes more than just desktop CPUs.
As you can see in this development roadmap image shared by AMD, there are two new series of mobile processors, ‘Dragon range’ and ‘Phoenix’.
The Dragon range series of CPUs stand out for one specific reason, and that’s the whopping 55W+ power rating.
Until recently, laptops generally never exceeded 45W and that was at the high-end of gaming laptops. However, AMD now seems to be ditching that limit, throwing caution to the wind and allowing laptops of a thicker chassis to accommodate these 55W beasts.
This should absolutely offer much higher performance compared to the mobile processors currently on offer – you can do a lot with 10W. This will obviously come at the expense of higher power consumption (not something you typically want in a laptop) and the expense of thermal performance, due to the higher TDP of the component. This is why AMD will only be integrating these Dragon range chips into larger, thicker laptops.
Highest core and thread count?
According to the slide shared by AMD, not only will the Dragon range have the highest power consumption we have ever seen on mobile CPUs, but they will also have the highest core count, thread count and cache size.
The current record holder goes to the Intel core i9-12900H, which boasts an impressive 14 cores and 20 threads. But recent reports of Intel’s HX series suggest we could see core and thread counts soar as high as 16 cores and 24 threads and an l3 cache size of 2MB. It will be very interesting to see if AMD can top that with the Dragon range.
Something for everyone
While AMD is going to be manufacturing high end 55W mobile processors with its Dragon range, another CPU range will be more geared toward the thin, efficient and powerful laptops we’ve come to know and love over the last few years. Introducing Phoenix, AMD’s new efficient and friendly mobile CPU range.
Phoenix will have a power draw between 35-45W, a much more comfortable figure. AMD have designed the CPUs with a much lower TDP and power demand, making them a much better fit for smaller and thinner gaming laptops. Not only that but Phoenix will be built on Zen 4 and also support PCIe 5 and LPDDR5 RAM just like the Dragon range, its bigger brother.
That’s really all the information we have around these two new and exciting mobile CPU series. We do know that these new CPUs won’t be coming to a gaming laptop near you until 2023, as the roadmap states. Nor do we have any concrete specifications, for that you’ll have to wait and see as AMD reveals Zen 4 mobile CPUs.
