Hold your hats, players. AMD’s massive new hardware roadmap was released on the company’s Financial Analyst Day, with CEO Lisa Su unveiling a range of upcoming hardware for commercial and consumer purposes.
Buried among the advertisements of Zen 5 CPUs and details about RDNA 3 Find a detailed paragraph detailing AMD’s planned release of new Ryzen ‘Phoenix Point’ and ‘Strix Point’ APUs for thin and light gaming laptops, starting in 2023.
For those who don’t know, an APU is an Accelerated Processing Unit; a chip that combines a CPU and an integrated GPU into a single component. The Phoenix Point APUs will utilize the Zen 4 processor microarchitecture and RDNA 3 graphics, with power requirements ranging from 35W to 45W. These chips will follow AMD’s naming convention and become the Ryzen 7000H series.
The Strix Point APUs, which will be released in 2024, will use the Zen 5 CPU architecture that is expected to be released in desktop CPUs in the same year. They will also release AMD’s RDNA 3+ iGPU cores and are rumored to feature a new L4 cache system. AMD is also releasing new data center APUs with equally impressive specs.
Analysis: Can we expect better gaming notebooks in 2023?
These APUs have huge potential for ultra-portable gaming notebooks. The previous generation of 6000H series ‘Rembrandt’ APUs were the first to implement the RDNA architecture (the older H series APUs were still running Vega graphics) and included the excellent Ryzen 7 6800HS laptop processor found in the new gaming laptop from Corsair.
The RDNA 3 (and its 3+ variant) is likely to be highly beneficial for gaming laptops, with or without a discrete GPU. With Rembrandt iGPUs outperforming older 1080p GPUs like the GTX 1060, we can probably expect solid 1080p gaming performance from these new APUs.
This can turn true FHD games into a ultra thin notebook a reality, without the need to heavily compromise graphics settings or frame rates. The low power requirements and (hopefully) reduced heat output on the Phoenix and Strix Point APUs also make them ideal candidates for gaming on integrated graphics in a thin and light system.