AMD Finally Reveals Its Next-Gen Gaming Laptop Chips – With Last-Gen Architecture

AMD has announced its next-generation Ryzen 8000 processors for gaming laptops, led by the Ryzen 9 8945HX. However, unlike the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop chips released earlier this year, these processors are built on the last-generation Zen 4 architecture.

Team Red is releasing four new processors for high-performance gaming laptops, with the Ryzen 9 8945HX featuring 16 cores, 32 threads and boost clock up to 5.4GHz. On the other end of the spectrum, AMD is also launching the Ryzen 7 8745HX, with 8 cores, 16 threads and a 5.1GHz boost clock. These processors all have remarkably similar specs to their last-generation counterparts, with the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX also being a 16-core part with a boost clock of 5.4GHz and 80MB of cache.

Still, these are the processors that will be paired with the fastest graphics chips in high-end gaming laptops. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Mobile that I reviewed earlier this year did struggle with a lower-power AMD Ryzen AI HX 370 processor, even though it was built on the newer Zen 5 architecture. The Ryzen 9 8945HX processor, on the other hand, can be configured to run with anywhere from 55W to 75W, which should significantly boost performance, even if that performance boost would have been greater with a Zen 5 chip with the same power budget.

If you were waiting for AMD’s latest processors to get a gaming laptop, they should be making their way into high-end gaming laptops over the next few months. I went ahead and broke down the specs of the new chips below.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra