If you were hoping to see some seriously powerful gaming laptops later this year, powered by the next top-end mobile silicon from AMD and Intel, those expectations might not be met, or at least that’s the latest gossip from the rumor mill.
Wccftech saw hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade – a source with a reasonable track record – comment Weibo as a result, there will be no new high-end mobile processors this year.
That statement was in reference to the future Xiaomi Redmi G Pro laptop refresh, which will have a high-end (HX series) Intel Arrow Lake CPU, but Wccftech points out that the comment refers to launches across the board. So in theory, this also includes AMD’s new Strix Point family of mobile processors (to an extent – we’ll get to that).
In short, the most powerful laptop CPUs will remain Intel’s top-end Raptor Lake Refresh (HX) and AMD’s Dragon Range HX (alongside Hawk Point below) for a while yet. At least in theory, because we should be hoping for the herbs here.
Analysis: Intel slowdown seems entirely possible
We can believe that Intel’s next HX series chips could be pushed to early 2025, and the same goes for AMD’s Strix Point Halo, the most powerful versions of Strix Point processors. Indeed, there has already been speculation that Strix Point Halo will be delayed until 2025, so that makes sense (at least based on past rumors). Fire Range HX, the successor to Dragon Range, will reportedly not debut until 2025.
However, we should still get standard Strix Point APUs for laptops in 2024 (pairing Zen 5 with RDNA 3.5 graphics), even though Wccftech seems to be drawing a broader conclusion here that Zen 5 mobile won’t arrive in 2024. The regular Strix Point will do that. They are still powerful notebook chips and should hit the market late summer 2024.
The Zen 5 desktop will definitely release sometime later in 2024 – most likely before the Arrow Lake desktop, according to rumors. The Arrow Lake desktop should hit the market in late 2024 from what we’ve heard, so it seems credible enough to have the laptop chips running a little later, in early 2025.
Still, we should be skeptical of all this information, as already noted.