AMD’s ultimate answer to gaming laptop CPUs is the Ryzen HX series – and in its current form, the Ryzen 7045HX series features a lineup of desktop chips ported to laptops with core counts to match. Recently one Geekbench entry (via @Olrak29_ on X/Twitter) suggests that the 9000HX series, Zen5’s desktop-replacement equivalent codenamed “Fire Range”, is in the works.
AMD Ryzen 9000HX “Fire Range”
The codename Fire Range succeeds from the 7045HX’s “Dragon Range” moniker, and in this case we’re looking at a 16-core processor with “AMD Eng Sample” indicating that it is a pre-production Engineering Sample (ES) chip. There’s no scores here as the test is done on Geekbench AI, with the host laptop being ASUS’s Zephyrus G16 laptop, and it shares the same “G614” model code as the Intel-powered ones currently sold today, meaning it should be the same laptop with Team Red’s internals.
Assuming that the chip is indeed of desktop-ported origin, that means it likely will have some slightly different power characteristics than the ones found in native laptop processors, like Strix Point. While AMD has made a name for itself with multi-chip CPUs on the desktop, its laptop chips to this day has been monolithic with the sole exception of Ryzen 7045HX series, which is a desktop-turned-mobile chip like the 9000HX is set to be.
That means you shouldn’t expect a particularly power-efficient chip out of laptops with these CPUs inside – it’s just not designed this way. That said, the sheer amount of cores will provide them lots of compute grunt, and perhaps competitive against Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX processors as it will also launch in similar timeframe. Expect announcements from AMD this coming week in CES 2025 as it will likely reveal more details.
Pokdepinion: Now that the Intel Arrow Lake-HX is allegedly at a core count deficit, I imagine AMD wins easily in multi-core departments this time around.
