The Red team today formally announced the new naming system to support its 2023 mobile processor family, this comes just before the Intel event which is scheduled at the end of this month and before the Apple event scheduled today.
AMD has seen incredible growth of its mobile business—notebook shipments with Ryzen processors have grown 49 percent in just two years—and in turn, has reinvested in all-new processor categories for 2023, including “Mendocino” for feature-rich mainstream notebooks and “Dragon Range” for top-tier gaming.
As they head to 2023 and have already made the formal announcement of the new Ryzen 7000 processors and the new Zen 4 architecture, their upcoming 5nm based mobile chips will formally be announced at the CES 2023.
However, before that as we can see AMD will have a broad portfolio of products under the Ryzen 7000 series so, to make users aware of the name schemes, AMD has declared that these new mobile processors will all be branded according to the following system:
This system is foundational to how AMD will be naming and numbering its mobile processors for years to come, from mainstream thin and light notebooks to the latest SOC for gaming and content creation. Here’s what AMD states about their new naming scheme:
The New System
Our 2023+ mobile processors will all be branded according to the new system you see below. Call it a “decoder ring,” if you like! Importantly, each digit means something. For example, if you see a processor that is AMD Ryzen xx4x, you’re looking at a chip with “Zen 4” inside. If you see a processor with AMD Ryzen xx30, it’s “Zen 3”. And Ryzen xx35 is “Zen 3+”. If the processor starts with a “7xxx,” you know you’re looking at a current product in AMD’s 2023 portfolio. And if you don’t know much about what’s inside a processor, a bigger number will simply give you more CPU performance. As an example, you can see how a hypothetical Ryzen 5 7640U maps to the decoder ring.
Some of the boxes are self-evident, but it’s worth going through them in brief to sketch out why we chose this system:
- Portfolio Year: Gives you a sense of what model year the processor lives in. Are we actively selling it as a current-gen product in that year?
- Segment: Helps us communicate “at-a-glance” performance to customers browsing in the store. For example, Ryzen 9 are always our fastest and most feature-rich processors. This helps customers cross-shop at a glance, and is the most common way customers compare CPUs.
- Architecture: A nod to our enthusiast customers, we wanted to make sure you could see what version of “Zen” lives inside the chip. It’s important!
- Feature Isolation: A concession to architectures like “Zen 3” versus “Zen 3+,” which cannot be fully articulated in the architecture digit alone. Flipping this digit between 0 or 5 ensures that two different architectures don’t end up in the same Ryzen 70xx family.
- Form Factor/TDP: AMD’s innovation and growth in the mobile space is especially evident here, where you can see we’re servicing multiple design categories across Windows and Chromebook.
How Does it Look for 2023?
We promised you a preview of how this naming system would apply to our planned products! In 2023, AMD is expecting to take on five different market/buying segments using five different SOCs. As you can see in the matrix below, it will be a mix of all-new design wins and refreshed 2022 systems, depending on what the laptop builder is looking for. But importantly, all products live under the AMD Ryzen 7000 umbrella, and each CPU architecture exists only within one series.
Just as a few examples: If you want a max performance gaming notebook, the AMD Ryzen 7045 Series will always give you a “Dragon Range” processor. If you want AMD’s latest ultrathin SOC for gaming and mobility, you’ll always find a “Phoenix” processor in the Ryzen 7040 Series.
The Years Ahead
This new numbering system is foundational to how we will be naming and numbering our mobile processors for years to come, and we’ve already smoke-tested it against a 5-year time horizon. We hope this new system will give everyone a better sense of what’s inside our processors, and we hope that it shows we’ve been listening to your conversations around the importance of model numbering.
