AMD might have renamed its upcoming Ryzen AI mobile chips (again) to one-up Intel's numbering scheme

Rumor mill: Team Red hasn't fully unveiled its next-generation mobile processors yet, but leaks suggest that the new lineup has undergone two recent name changes. AMD might be mimicking Intel's recent CPU rebranding to symbolize the start of the "AI PC era," while also trying to make its version's numbers appear higher.

According to known leaker Golden Pig, AMD has adjusted the naming scheme for its upcoming mobile CPUs for the second time this month. The changes reflect a focus on AI applications and possibly a perceived performance advantage over Intel.

Two of AMD's mobile processors coming later this year might be called Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365. The new designations suggest a slight change from the Ryzen AI HX 170 name that appeared earlier this month.

Golden Pig speculates that AMD doesn't want products labeled "AI 100" to appear weaker or older than Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake processors, called Core Ultra 200V.

If the reports prove accurate, both CPU vendors will have adopted new naming schemes to emphasize the new push toward onboard AI capabilities leveraging powerful NPUs. Intel began the trend with the launch of its Meteor Lake series late last year, which ditched the Core-I naming scheme to debut under the designation Core Ultra 100.

AMD's upcoming 2024 mobile processors have been codenamed "Strix Point" for years, and observers initially assumed the company would eventually release them as Ryzen 8000. However, leaker @harukaze5719 uncovered a leaked product listing for forthcoming Asus notebooks featuring specs consistent with prior Strix Point reports with the Ryzen AI name.

Any confirmation of the revised branding would likely come at Computex 2024 next month, where AMD is expected to unveil the new lineup. Asus will also likely reveal its new laptops at the event.

Meanwhile, new rumors indicate that the first Strix Point systems might begin shipping in August. An administrator of the official Discord server for Mini-PC vendor AOOSTAR claimed that large OEMs (likely companies like Asus or MSI) will launch next-generation Ryzen products in August, while it and possibly other smaller PC vendors will release Strix Point devices around October.

Strix Point will utilize CPUs from AMD's upcoming Zen 5 architecture, likely for laptops, tablets, mini-PCs, and handheld gaming PCs. Desktop Zen 5 processors, codenamed Granit Ridge, are expected to launch under the Ryzen 9000 label later in 2024.

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AMD might have renamed its upcoming Ryzen AI mobile chips (again) to one-up Intel's numbering scheme

AMD mobile options have been frustrating to work around when shopping for a laptop. I'm not too worried about the AI stuff, but there have been some interesting uses for localized AI that I've heard about. The most attractive feature is better NPC AI in games. Making their names too close to Intel's could be problematic. I don't think that's too big of an issue because for the people who care about that kind of thing would already be familiar with it and know what they're looking for. Most people are concerned with a hard budget rather than performance.

I have been having a big problem searching for a laptop for awhile now. I was dead set on the Minisform V3, which is an amazing device, but I don't like the lack of a "solid" keyboard. I've recently been looking at the HP Envy's as it has physical keyboard that can fold into a tablet. I am dead set on getting something with an 8core AMD cpu with the 780M and 32GB of ram, but that has been almost impossible to find. Anything that has something like the 8840HS also comes with a discrete GPU, usually nVidia, and that is a big no-no for me.

I need something that can run Linux and I'm worried that having an AMD GPU(780m) and mixing that with an nVidia GPU could cause some conflicts and instability problems that I just don't want to deal with. nVidia has announced they are going to start supporting Linux with open source drivers so that seems less of issue, but driver maturity is a concern of mine. While Linux is several orders of magnitude more user friendly than it was even just 5 years ago, I wont pretend that it is perfect.

I'm probably a weirdo and (sometimes) enjoy troubleshooting as part of the hobby, but I don't want to pay ~$1500 for a product that may or may not have a smooth user experience. This frustration is compounded by the fact that the solution is as simple as not pairing something like the 8840HS with a discrete GPU that I wont use. It's also a laptop so I don't want to waste battery life, or money, on a GPU that I wont be using.

AI is getting to the point that it may have some function on PCs so I'm not as hard-line anti-AI as I was previously. Something that I'm really interested in is how AI functionality in PCs will transfer from Windows to Linux. So, currently, I would like my next CPU to have AI built in so I can experiment with it. Who knows, this AI PC stuff might turn into something interesting. It's been awhile since anything "big" has popped up in the computer space so I'd happily be proven wrong if AI turns out to revolutionize how we interact with technology. The last time I was legitimately excited about a large change in computing was when multi-core CPUs became standard in the PC space.

Then Intel takes Core _ 400, etc. So that battle is going to continue. Sadly, almost anything would be an improvement over AMD’s customer-confusing mobile chip naming scheme.

yRaz said:

I need something that can run Linux and I'm worried that having an AMD GPU(780m) and mixing that with an nVidia GPU could cause some conflicts and instability problems that I just don't want to deal with. nVidia has announced they are going to start supporting Linux with open source drivers so that seems less of issue, but driver maturity is a concern of mine.

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I doubt today’s nVidia would ever open-source their drivers. They may have hired the lead Nouveau dev but I don’t see them re-architecting their entire driver architecture around his work. If anything, I think they hired him to allow them to deprecate legacy GPUs more quickly, since Nouveau seems to be geared towards old gpu support anyways. nVidia might see Nouveau as a better solution than dealing with the headache of maintaining multiple and older proprietary nVidia drivers with frequently updating Linux kernels. Just speculating.