CES 2023: AMD’s monster 7000-series laptop chips come with up to 16-cores

AMD has announced its latest 7000-series laptop chips at CES 2023 with the AMD Ryzen 7045 leading the way. The new chips are based on a mixture of the firm’s Zen 4, Zen 3, Zen 3+ and Zen 2 architectures and encompass a mind-boggling five series of CPUs.

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At the top end, powering gaming and high-powered graphics workstation laptops, sits the monstrous-looking AMD Ryzen 7045. This series comprises four CPUs – the Ryzen 9 7945HX, Ryzen 9 7845HX, Ryzen 7 7745HX and Ryzen 5 7645HX – with up to 16-cores and 32-threads, maximum clock speeds of up to 5.4GHz and TDPs of up to 75W.

On paper, it doesn’t look as impressive as Intel’s 13 Gen Core i9-13980HX but all 16 of the AMD chip’s cores are high-performance parts, whereas that’s only the case for eight of the Intel CPU’s cores – the rest are efficiency cores, aimed at carrying out more mundane tasks but using less power.

Further down the range is the AMD Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” series, which you can expect to see in more affordable “Elite Ultrathin” laptops. Like the 7045 series, the 7040 chips employ AMD’s latest Zen 4 architecture (the architecture is denoted by the third digit in the name) but they’re slightly less ambitious when it comes to core counts and clock speeds, and there’s more of a focus on efficiency.

These chips have either six or eight cores and 12 or 16 threads, are built on a 4nm fabrication process and have RDNA3-based integrated graphics. Initially, we’ll see three HS models in this series – the Ryzen 9 7940HS, the Ryzen 7 7840HS and the Ryzen 5 7640HS were all launched by AMD at CES – but there will also be low-power U models launched later in the year.

The AMD Ryzen 7035 series is next, featuring the Zen 3+ architecture, and is designed for “premium thin and light” laptops. Built with a less power-efficient 6nm fabrication process, these chips have slightly less powerful RDNA2 integrated graphics than the 7040 CPUs, and a core count of between four and eight. There will be five Ryzen 7035 series chips, starting at the lower-end Ryzen 3 7335U, rising to the top-end Ryzen 7 7735HS.

The rest of the range is targeted at “mainstream thin and light” laptops (Ryzen 7030) and “everyday computing” (Ryzen 7020) – the sort of chips you’ll see in machines costing between £600 and £1,000.

You can expect to see the new chips appearing in new laptops very soon, with models from HP, Lenovo, Acer, Dell and Asus already confirmed.