AMD Promises 'Extreme Gaming Laptops' in 2023 With New Dragon Range CPU

An anonymous reader shares a report: A funny thing happened in 2020: AMD won the gaming laptop for the first time ever. Until the Asus Zephyrus G14, we'd never seen a laptop with an AMD CPU and AMD GPU run circles around the competition. Since then, we've repeatedly seen that "AMD laptop" no longer means cheap. But now, AMD is setting its sights higher than mid-range gaming machines -- it just revealed it's building a new CPU aimed at the "pinnacle of gaming performance" with the "highest core, thread and cache ever." The new CPU line is codenamed "Dragon Range," and they'll live exclusively at 55W TDP and up -- enough power that they'll "largely exist in the space where gaming laptops are plugged in the majority of the time," says AMD director of technical marketing Robert Hallock.

APU only? or planing for CPU + GPU systems as well

[Joe_Dragon]

APU only? or planing for CPU + GPU systems as well
DDR5?

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I just wish they would get their act together. Been waiting for some Ryzen laptops with USB 4 for literally years now. They keep getting pushed back.

So what makes the apus so interesting

[rsilvergun]

Is that if they reach the performance they claim they will it should be roughly equivalent to a $130 - $160 GPU. That'll be the first time in history that integrated video is capable of gaming that acceptable frame rates and resolutions and without major compromises. Not sure going to be blowing the socks off anything but you'll be able to run all the esports titles at 120 FPS at 1080p medium and you'll be able to run regular games at 1080p low and 60 frames per second.

That'll be transformative for the

Oh, and it'll lower GPU prices too

[rsilvergun]

because lots of folks will find the APUs "good enough" meaning less people buying GPUs. Yes this means AMD is biting into their GPU sales, but demand is so high (since crypto isn't going away any time soon) that I don't think they're concerned.

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[DrMrLordX]

Dragon Ridge may bear a striking resemblance to desktop Raphael. It is fairly well-known by now that desktop Raphael on AM5 will have a tiny iGPU embedded in the I/O die, unlike existing Ryzen desktop CPUs that have no iGPU. It is thought that Dragon Ridge is the previously-rumoured Raphael-H, which may just be desktop Raphael intended for BGA laptop configs at lower power, where mobile dGPUs will be required for any kind of real graphics performance. The best-in-breed iGPUs will possibly be in lower-pow

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[thegarbz]

APU only? or planing for CPU + GPU systems as well
DDR5?

Every laptop CPU is some form of APU regardless of whether you use a dedicated GPU or not. Even all of intel's offerings will using the CPU based GPU for most tasks and when it comes time to play games your GPU will render the frame and pass it on to your CPU to send to the screen.

Also why would you want DDR5 in a laptop? Right now there's no real benefit, not in speed or power use. Give it another 3-5 years.

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[DrMrLordX]

Dragon Ridge looks like the rumoured Raphael-H APU. In other words, it's going to bear a striking resemblance to Raphael desktop CPUs.

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[OneOfMany07]

Stop complaining randomly in articles, and fix something yourself. Stop waiting for others to do what you want and can do yourself. Or if you can't then figure out who can, and help them. Walls of text won't change anyone's mind.

Please don't feed the troll.

[mmell]

Not even cyanide (as tempting as that may be).

Lets stretch the truth with vague statements.

[OneOfMany07]

"Won" meaning their CPU paired with an NVIDIA GPU seemed good enough for gaming at the time.

I'd assumed it was they beat Intel's built in crap GPU, but no...not even that. Just that the CPU isn't abysmal in lower power situations like AMD always had been (they'd needed to use higher TDP's = heat/watts to reach similar performance as Intel). I guess that's progress still, but far from "AMD has won the laptop wars!!!1!"

I wonder if this will be higher power usage or not. The previous laptop was 35W just for the CPU (no idea what laptop GPU's take). This mentioned 55W and up with an expectation to always be plugged in (portable desktop with attached monitor).

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[yuvcifjt]

You're woefully out-of-touch!

The AMD CPU you're talking about is from 2010's. Even bulldozer-based laptop chips were cool, although largely inferior to Intel offerings to some degree, but they usually undercut Intel in pricing which made them competitive.

However, Ryzen mobile chips are an entirely different ballgame, and have been largely beating Intel in power efficiency and performance for the last few years now, but far more so in the last 2 years.

Intel cpu's for both desktop and laptops since the 9th-ge

"Gaming" "Laptops"

[splutty]

Two words that don't belong in the same sentence.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[DamnOregonian]

Yup. I like mine because I can pull it out and put it on my kitchen table and game for a bit. I live in a condo, so I don't have an abundance of free space.
Previously, I just streamed games from a headless desktop that I had hidden behind the couch, but eventually I got a gaming laptop and I haven't touched my desktop for games since.
I still use its GPU for computational purposes, but otherwise, it mostly just sits there sleeping.

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[mmell]

I fried the battery in mine. Had to remove it when it started bending the keyboard; system won't boot without it.

Going back to a desktop for gaming (soon as I have the bucks to spare, I don't feel like white boxing anymore). My personal experience, YMMV.

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[bemymonkey]

With the current pricing of desktop hardware the price/performance gap is shrinking.

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[CaptainLugnuts]

I just want a Dell XPS equivalent to replace my long in the tooth 2015 model.

Something with a Ryzen 7 6800U CPU using the built in GPU. I don't game, I want long battery life when I'm not hammering on the CPU with compiles.

Re: "Gaming" "Laptops"

[ravenshrike]

Zen is pretty good at power scaling. The eco mode on the "xtreme" laptops might not be half bad.

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[jma05]

I used to think like that.
Now I need to move between countries and a Desktop is no longer practical for me.
Besides, my idea of gaming is this: https://xkcd.com/606/ [xkcd.com]

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[thegarbz]

Two words that don't belong in the same sentence.

Why not? It's not like every game is Cyberpunk 2077. 99.9% of games on the market will happily run on low end hardware, plug the laptop into screen / docking station if you wish.

But more importantly why should you forgo gaming just because you're not at home? I greatly prefer the larger screen of my laptop compared to my Steamdeck.

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[rantrantrant]

Mine works fine for checking emails & surfing the web.

I'll stick with Intel

[RitchCraft]

Yes, Intel is higher priced. Yes, their performance has been slightly incremental over the last 10+ years. But, for a tech that has been in the industry for 30+ years AMD has just pulled too many goofs over the years. I only ran AMD 386/486 systems back in the day because they were excellent. Then came the goofy naming conventions and speed listings that confused consumers. ("Yes sir, the actual speed of the CPU is 75MHz but it's supposed to perform like an Intel 133MHz. Just ignore the BIOS reporting it at

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[ELCouz]

F00F / FDIV / TSX Bug / Meltdown / Plundervolt .... I member

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[thegarbz]

A great list of things that never affected me negatively in any way whatsoever.

But if you're scared by bugs you should read the Zen2 erratum list. There's a cool list of over 150 bugs in AMD CPUs. Now before you say "fanboi" note that this is not out of the ordinary. Intel's erratum list for each generation is just as long.

Point is, you're delusional if you think bugs don't affect all vendors just because you got scared about what was picked up in the news.

With all due respect

[rsilvergun]

What are you on about? You're talking about crap from 20 or 30 years ago. Which has no bearing on modern Ryzen CPUs and APUs. AMD is extremely competitive with Intel right now and has forced into slash its prices by upwards to 50%. As someone who remembers the dark ages of the FX and 8000 series having the Ryzen CPUs finally compete head-on with Intel and then most cases knock the socks off of them has been a revelation. The only place until can compete without massively dropping its prices is a very top to

Re:With all due respect

[drinkypoo]

Not only are they talking about old crap, but they're talking crap. Those old AMD processors really were faster, or at least just as fast for less money. The K5 in particular was an amazing value. The only miss was the K6, which had enough incompatibilities that you needed a bunch of patches for it to work properly with Windows. This was very sad because it was actually a smokin' fast CPU for very little money. I ran gentoo on a K6/2-400 laptop and it was absolutely pissed off, because I cranked up the optimization and was very specific about the architecture settings. Too bad about the Rage Pro video, though. It worked, but the 3d was barely screensaver-worthy.

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[Ecuador]

You misremember some things. I had a K6/2-233, one of the best value/money CPUs I've ever bought - only weakness was the slower than intel FPU, but it didn't affect things I needed to run at the time. It was as fast as an equivalent PII at everything else, while it was priced less at a similar frequency Pentium I (which was significantly slower). No patches needed ever, it had no incompatibilities.
What you probably remember is that Microsoft had a timing loop bug in the original Windows 95, where any CPU ov

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[drinkypoo]

I've had literally every generation of K6 processor. The original K6 had a 24 bit FPU that produced incompatibilities compared to Intel CPUs, for example.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I really have no idea what you are talking about. The K6 FPU was a x87-compatible 80bit FPU.

Re:I'll stick with Intel

[UnknowingFool]

Yes, their performance has been slightly incremental over the last 10+ years.

You seem to be forgetting the last 5 years where AMD has handily beaten Intel in performance. Only with Alder Lake has Intel retaken performance lead but requiring a great of power and cooling.

) Then came the heat related issues and shoddy CPUs.

You seem to be forgetting recent Intel issues.

. In 30+ years I've only seen maybe 5 bad Intel CPUs. In that same time span I have seen countless bad AMD CPUs.

Did you forget whole generations of Intel CPUs that were susceptible to Spectre/Meltdown? While many manufacturers had problems with those two, Intel was not immune.

These issues and countless games/software needing AMD CPU patches over the years because of incompatibilities has ensured I always stick with Intel.

Again where you asleep during Spectre and Meltdown? And the ongoing security issues with speculative execution?

There's a word for that.

[geekmux]

"they'll live exclusively at 55W TDP and up -- enough power that they'll "largely exist in the space where gaming laptops are plugged in the majority of the time,"

It's quite incredible the lengths they will go to not invent the desktop again.

Tower-sized form factor? We gave you shoulder straps, what more do you want?

That's too easy.

[John.Banister]

Make a laptop that's both the best gaming laptop and the best mobile workstation for content creators at the same time. I understand that each job has needs that the other doesn't care about, but being good at the one doesn't hinder being good at the other. Meet all the needs, AMD, and make the best laptop ever. Or, since it'll likely be plugged in most all the time, make it as an AIO with an attachable battery.

Won?

[larryjoe]

AMD won the gaming laptop for the first time ever

"Won" in this context means winning performance benchmarks. That's a moral victory type of win. Real winning only means market share. That's why AMD is crushing Intel and competing with Nvidia when looking at benchmarks, but in reality AMD is still getting crushed by both Intel and Nvidia in the only thing that matters.

That's nice and all

[Opportunist]

But will we actually be able to buy them or are they going to be the same unobtanium as the current GPUs where the only way to get any is to pay scalpers about 3x what these things are actually worth?

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[calken1979]

This is the reason I feel that Intel have been "slower" over a couple of generations, not that they were incapable of the engineering but being able to deliver a design that was fab-able in sufficient quantities to meet demand. Upgrading fabs whilst meeting existing demand must be a significant logistical and technological challenge.

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[UnknowingFool]

Not really. The main reason Intel have been slower is Intel has not been able to make 10nm chips with acceptable yields and had to use older 14nm fabs. Intel's manufacturing woes have been well documented. Even now they have been able to retake the performance lead but Alder Lake requires significantly more power and cooling to achieve that lead.