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In the market for a new laptop, AMD has overhauled how it names its mobile processors, and yes,

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I know, things are already confusing enough in the tech world with how many changes there have been

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to USB and Wi-Fi and display standards, but it turns out Team Red isn't just doing this to torture

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us. You see, AMD apparently ran out of ways to fit their upcoming laptop processors into their

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old naming scheme, so there's a new one that… well, it takes a little bit of explaining.

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Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we'd like to thank our friend Matthew Hurwitz from AMD for

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helping to clarify the reasoning behind some of the decisions the company made.

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Going forward, each laptop CPU is going to have a name with four digits followed by a letter,

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but the two most important for those of you concerned about performance will be the middle

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two digits. The second digit is going to tell you whether the chip is a Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, 7, or 9,

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or a lower-end Athlon chip, denoted by a 1 or 2. Confusingly though, already it's confusing,

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the second digit won't always match up to the actual product stack. Both 3 and 4 can indicate

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a Ryzen 3 chip, 5 and 6 can indicate a Ryzen 5, and here's the real curveball, 8 could indicate

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a Ryzen 7 or a Ryzen 9. The third digit, mercifully, is a little more straightforward. This lines up

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with whichever architectural generation the chip uses, so 3 for Zen 3, 4 for Zen 4, and 5 for the

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upcoming Zen 5. Nice and simple. But what about the other numbers? Well, the first digit of the whole

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name is the model year. 7 for 2023, 8 for 2024, and 9 for 2025. Although the model year itself

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doesn't tell you much about the processor's capabilities, I mean, it's not a car, AMD told us

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that the reason this was placed first was to allow customers to quickly tell if the laptop is current,

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or if it's a previous year's model. And in case you're wondering how in the world a 7 corresponds

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to 2023, last year's mobile parts started with a 6. And this Zen's desktop chip names will start

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with a 7, so there's some harmony there. Another goal of starting with the model year is to easily

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indicate when there's a model that's similar to last year's, but with a slightly higher performance.

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So a 7530 and an 8530, for example. Those would denote similar chips, but with the latter being

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a little newer and a little nicer than the former, even though they'd be using the same architecture.

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But one of the things that's a bit annoying about this naming scheme is even if these are

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not on the same architecture, an older design could still have a bigger number up front,

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a potential point of confusion for consumers. Okay, but what about the rest of the naming scheme?

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The fourth number is always going to be either a 0 or a 5, and simply indicates either a lower end

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or a higher end chip, respectively, all other things being equal. The letter at the end, though,

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is a little more interesting. CPU-efficient models will be familiar with the letter suffixes,

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especially on the mobile side. An AMD's new scheme is curiously similar to what we've

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seen with their rivals at Intel. Top-end laptop processors will get an HX designation,

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indicating a TDP of 55 watts and higher. Sitting below that is HS for 35 plus watt chips that are

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still high-end, but geared more towards thin form factor systems. Moving down the stack,

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we have the 15 plus watt U suffix for ultra-thin notebooks and C for Chromebooks.

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Finally, there's a little E, which designates a 9 plus watt computer that's basically a

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fanless version of the U. So what does this all mean for you? Well, a lot of Harbor enthusiast

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sites have panned the naming scheme as being overly complicated, as well as a way for AMD to

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pass off what are essentially older chips as being current models, similar to the shenanigans of how

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NVIDIA has continually rebadged lower-end GPUs that are many years old. On the flip side,

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having the middle couple of numbers giving us lots of information about the product, again,

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similar to NVIDIA as well as Radeon GPUs, isn't new, and Team Red did at least provide us with an

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explainer. But what do you think of all this, especially as it compares to AMD's old naming

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scheme? Comment down below and remember to argue with your fellow viewers as much as possible.

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That's what makes a healthy comment section. We love to see it. Thanks for watching guys,

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if you liked this video hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions of videos that we should cover in the future.