AMD is purportedly preparing Ryzen 200 “Hawk Point Refresh” APUs

Written on November 13, 2024.

AMD is allegedly planning to refresh its Ryzen 8040 or Hawk Point lineup of APUs using the new Ryzen 200 branding—possibly by CES 2025—per the Golden Pig Upgrade Pack. This is to better align AMD’s upcoming offerings—including refreshes—with its existing Ryzen AI 300 series, and future products should be named based on the same nomenclature: Ryzen AI 400, Ryzen AI 500—you get the idea.

AMD took the market by storm with its Phoenix APUs (Ryzen 7040) back in 2023 – based on the Zen 4 and RDNA 3 architecture. Last December, AMD revealed the Ryzen 8040 series, “Hawk Point,” which was essentially rebadged Phoenix silicon packaged with a better NPU – still based on XDNA 1. Strix Point, which should’ve been the Ryzen 8050/9050 series, introduced Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 to the masses using a new Ryzen AI 300 moniker.

The leak suggests AMD is again refreshing Hawk Point (or re-refreshing Phoenix) under the Ryzen 200 series. It is also said that these APUs will lack an NPU, which could be a drawback for some customers as the NPU will likely be fused off – making them inferior to Hawk Point in silicon binning. From the Ryzen 200 lineup, we have the Ryzen 7 255 (rebadged Ryzen 7 8745H) and the Ryzen 7 260 (rebadged Ryzen 7 8845H) to counter Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake-H mobile family.

As for the specifications, the same leaker shared AMD’s entire mobile portfolio for the upcoming two years, per which the Ryzen 200 APUs will seemingly pack up to eight Zen 4 cores alongside a 12 CU RDNA 3 iGPU (Radeon 780M). The memory support remains unchanged at DDR5-5600/LPDDR5X-7500.

Customers should exercise great caution when purchasing a laptop this time around. Intel is refreshing Alder Lake with the Core 200H/U lineup of CPUs. Likewise, AMD abandoned its traditional naming convention and hopped on the AI bandwagon, the Ryzen AI 300 series. In tandem with the unintuitive and always-changing naming schemes – the sheer number of refreshes is bound to confuse many people who aren’t as tech-savvy as us.