AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX Spotted In ASUS ROG Laptop, Likely “Dragon Range Refresh” Chip

During AMD’s CES announcement this year, the chipmaker listed Ryzen 9000HX series “Fire Range” as the direct successor of the Ryzen 7000HX “Dragon Range”, with no mentions of the gap that is 8000HX series. That gap is now filled with the spotting of a new ASUS ROG Strix laptop that features the Ryzen 9 8940HX, and it looks like the chip is simply a refreshed versions of the Dragon Range lineup.

AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX Spotted

Some refresher – AMD’s Ryzen HX series has been essentially the desktop-class processors designed for high-performance laptops since the 7000 series, sharing the same chipset-based design like the desktop Ryzen CPUs. This applies to the new Ryzen 9000HX series as well, which is based on Zen 5’s desktop equivalents.

In the case of Ryzen 9 8940HX found in this ASUS ROG Strix G16 laptop found in Chinese marketplace JD.com (via Weibo), it’s 100MHz faster than its direct predecessor, the Ryzen 9 7940HX. The laptop is also spotted featuring NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, along with 16GB DDR5 RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.

Worth noting that this is likely not the fastest chip in the lineup, however. The top model in the Ryzen 7000HX series is the Ryzen 9 7945HX (or 7945HX3D if you include the special 3D V-Cache version), which comes with 5.4GHz boost clock, whereas this Ryzen 9 8940HX features 5.3GHz boost clock. Still, given that the underlying architecture is the same as its predecessor, expect minimal changes in CPU performance.

For higher-end laptops, AMD still provides the choice of Ryzen 9000HX series or Ryzen AI 300 series, both providing plenty of CPU performance for gaming laptops; alternatively, there’s also the Ryzen AI Max series that packs the CPU and GPU into a single die, which can be found in compact laptops with plenty of performance on tap.

Pokdepinion: I expect this lineup to fill in the gap below latest gen chips with lower costs.