CES 2023 | AMD brings chiplets to 5 nm Dragon Range-HX 7045HX mobile APUs led by 16C/32T Ryzen 9 7945HX

AMD's Ryzen 7000 mobile stack spans across three broad categories: 

• Phoenix 7040, Rembrandt-R 7035, Barcelo-R 7030, and Mendocino 7020: 15-28 W U-series APUs for thin and light laptops.
• Phoenix 7040 and Rembrandt-R 7035: 35-45 W HS-series APUs for thin enthusiast laptops.
• Dragon Range 7045: 55 W+ HX-series for ultra-enthusiast machines.

We've long speculated that AMD will follow Intel's footsteps in bringing desktop-class Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 chips in a BGA package for enthusiast laptops. While initially it was assumed that Raphael-H will be expanded to 65 W, we soon learnt that AMD will be launching HX-class CPUs under the Dragon Range moniker. Now, these APUs are finally official.

The Ryzen Dragon Range-HX APUs are the company's first chiplet designs for mobile. They offer up to 16 cores and 32 threads, 80 MB of combined L2 and L3 cache, boost clocks up to 5.4 GHz, and a 55 W+ TDP. Expect to see laptops with up to 100 W TDPs in the coming months.

These APUs also include RDNA 2 graphics in the I/O die but with only two compute units (CUs) as laptops featuring these APUs will definitely include a more powerful dGPU.

The I/O also includes the PCH, but OEMs will have to add-in additional controllers on the board for features such as USB 4 connectivity.

According to AMD, the Ryzen 9 7945HX can be up to 18% faster in single-core while being up to 78% faster in multi-core when compared to a Ryzen 9 6900HX-powered notebook. The company also claims significant improvements in gaming performance in select titles.