In the market for a new laptop, AMD has overhauled how it names its mobile processors, and yes,
I know, things are already confusing enough in the tech world with how many changes there have been
to USB and Wi-Fi and display standards, but it turns out Team Red isn't just doing this to torture
us. You see, AMD apparently ran out of ways to fit their upcoming laptop processors into their
old naming scheme, so there's a new one thatâ¦ well, it takes a little bit of explaining.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we'd like to thank our friend Matthew Hurwitz from AMD for
helping to clarify the reasoning behind some of the decisions the company made.
Going forward, each laptop CPU is going to have a name with four digits followed by a letter,
but the two most important for those of you concerned about performance will be the middle
two digits. The second digit is going to tell you whether the chip is a Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, 7, or 9,
or a lower-end Athlon chip, denoted by a 1 or 2. Confusingly though, already it's confusing,
the second digit won't always match up to the actual product stack. Both 3 and 4 can indicate
a Ryzen 3 chip, 5 and 6 can indicate a Ryzen 5, and here's the real curveball, 8 could indicate
a Ryzen 7 or a Ryzen 9. The third digit, mercifully, is a little more straightforward. This lines up
with whichever architectural generation the chip uses, so 3 for Zen 3, 4 for Zen 4, and 5 for the
upcoming Zen 5. Nice and simple. But what about the other numbers? Well, the first digit of the whole
name is the model year. 7 for 2023, 8 for 2024, and 9 for 2025. Although the model year itself
doesn't tell you much about the processor's capabilities, I mean, it's not a car, AMD told us
that the reason this was placed first was to allow customers to quickly tell if the laptop is current,
or if it's a previous year's model. And in case you're wondering how in the world a 7 corresponds
to 2023, last year's mobile parts started with a 6. And this Zen's desktop chip names will start
with a 7, so there's some harmony there. Another goal of starting with the model year is to easily
indicate when there's a model that's similar to last year's, but with a slightly higher performance.
So a 7530 and an 8530, for example. Those would denote similar chips, but with the latter being
a little newer and a little nicer than the former, even though they'd be using the same architecture.
But one of the things that's a bit annoying about this naming scheme is even if these are
not on the same architecture, an older design could still have a bigger number up front,
a potential point of confusion for consumers. Okay, but what about the rest of the naming scheme?
The fourth number is always going to be either a 0 or a 5, and simply indicates either a lower end
or a higher end chip, respectively, all other things being equal. The letter at the end, though,
is a little more interesting. CPU-efficient models will be familiar with the letter suffixes,
especially on the mobile side. An AMD's new scheme is curiously similar to what we've
seen with their rivals at Intel. Top-end laptop processors will get an HX designation,
indicating a TDP of 55 watts and higher. Sitting below that is HS for 35 plus watt chips that are
still high-end, but geared more towards thin form factor systems. Moving down the stack,
we have the 15 plus watt U suffix for ultra-thin notebooks and C for Chromebooks.
Finally, there's a little E, which designates a 9 plus watt computer that's basically a
fanless version of the U. So what does this all mean for you? Well, a lot of Harbor enthusiast
sites have panned the naming scheme as being overly complicated, as well as a way for AMD to
pass off what are essentially older chips as being current models, similar to the shenanigans of how
NVIDIA has continually rebadged lower-end GPUs that are many years old. On the flip side,
having the middle couple of numbers giving us lots of information about the product, again,
similar to NVIDIA as well as Radeon GPUs, isn't new, and Team Red did at least provide us with an
explainer. But what do you think of all this, especially as it compares to AMD's old naming
scheme? Comment down below and remember to argue with your fellow viewers as much as possible.
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