AMD's laptop plans for 2025 include a lot rebranded and refreshed APUs. But who cares? We'll have Fire Range, Strix Halo and four RDNA4 mobile GPUs next year.

It's hard for me to believe that 2025 will be here in just two months, but there are so many new gaming PCs coming out next year that it's really too long. You might be disappointed if you were hoping AMD would bring its desktop CPU magic into laptops. Current plans point to a number of refreshes and new brands of current APUs. But they will be matched by some great gaming chips.

According to Wccftech citing a video that has been removed from Weibo by Golden Pig Upgrade Pack the current Ryzen AI 300 Series will still consist Strix Point APUs -- a CPU with four Zen 5 or eight Zen 5c Cores and a GPU equipped with 16 RDNA-3.5 compute units (CUs). Kraken Point will join them, and it looks like a Strix Point processor that's been partially disabled. It's because the chip has four Zen 5c cores or CUs less.

Even the new Ryzen AI 200 chips are just rebranded Hawk Point Ryzen 8400-series processors with eight Zen4 cores and twelve RDNA 3 CUs. AMD plans to release laptop versions of its Ryzen 9000-series processors under the codename Fire Range. These will include 3D V-Cache and other variants.

These will be the same chiplets that are used in the desktop versions of the Dragon Range. They'll just be smaller and with lower clocks (and power limits, presumably). The Ryzen 9 7945HX, which is used in the Asus ROG Scar 17, is a great gaming laptop CPU. The Zen 5 version should at least be as good.

The Strix Halo chips - aka Ryzen AI Max - will be the real stars of the laptops show. The specs of the chips have been leaked before, but they are still worth mentioning, especially given how disappointing other 'new APUs' seem to be. The Ryzen AI Max Pro 380 will be the lowest-end model, with only six Zen 5 cores. It also has 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs. The AI Max+ 395 is at the other end of this scale, with 16 Zen5 cores and (yes, forty!) RDNA 3.5 cores.

The video does provide some additional information. Instead of extending the current naming system for integrated graphics in notebooks (e.g. Radeon 780M, Radeon 890M and Radeon 8060S will be AMD's new names for the 40 CU and 32 CU iGPU variants.

I can understand why AMD needed to have a different name for these new graphics cards (the performance difference between an 8050S and a 780M will be huge thanks to the 256 bit memory bus), but this is just more confusion with AMD's complex nomenclature.

In the same video, AMD also announced their next-generation discrete laptop graphics cards. Before the video was removed, X user Everest, via Igor's Lab, managed to capture a screenshot from a slide that showed the current RX7000M variants being swapped out for one of four "R25M" chips. However, there's not a lot of information.

They will (or should I say, hopefully) be. RDNA 4 GPUs will have 8 GB VRAM on a 128 bit memory bus with a power budget of 50 to 130 W. Nvidia's cheapest laptop GPU, the RTX 40050, only has 6 GB of VRAM on a 96 bit memory bus.

The R25M will be used in higher-end laptops, with 16 GB VRAM, a memory bus of 256 bits, and a maximum power of 175 W. The details are not enough to tell us about performance, as they do not mention the CU count or clock speeds. It's true that I would be surprised if the RX 7000M models were less powerful.

AMD's efforts will be in vain if it can't convince laptop vendors to use their chips. Newegg's latest laptops, excluding third-party sellers and excluding Intel CPUs, feature around 50 models with Nvidia GPUs.

Only 11 models are shown when searching for AMD CPUs. One of these has a discrete AMD laptop GPU. Searching from any seller will give a better picture, but finding one with a Radeon RX 7900M is frustrating.

AMD has the goods to last us until 2025, and even if they are just rehashes, we need more gaming laptop makers to use them.