Pay for Ryzen 7, get less than Ryzen 5: AMD's marketing misleads customers

The first laptops equipped with the new AMD Ryzen AI 7 345 can now be pre-ordered in Europe, as a look at the price comparison website Geizhals shows. The cheapest laptop with this chip costs €999. This means that laptops with Ryzen AI 7 345 are currently significantly more expensive than laptops with Ryzen AI 5 340, such as the HP OmniBook 3 ($590 on Amazon).

This is despite the fact that the Ryzen AI 7 345 is slower than the Ryzen AI 5 340. This is because the name of the latest Ryzen chip is misleading, as the chip only offers two instead of three large Zen 5 cores, which also have a 200 MHz lower boost clock. Although there is an additional Zen 5c core, it achieves lower clock frequencies, meaning that the CPU performance should be slightly worse compared to the Ryzen AI 5 340.

AMD has also halved the L3 cache compared to the Ryzen AI 5 340, while two of the 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes have been removed. The AMD Radeon 840M is identical on both chips, but with only four compute units it is too slow for most games. As the comparison with the Ryzen AI 7 350 shows, the latest Ryzen AI 7 is significantly slower than you would expect from a current chip in this series.