AMD quietly announces Ryzen 8000HX series — Dragon Range Refresh arrives to replace AMD's top laptop CPUs

(Image credit: AMD)

AMD has officially announced its Ryzen 8000HX Series of mobile CPUs today, intended for gaming and other high-end applications. Codenamed Dragon Range Refresh, the chips serve as a refresh of AMD's Ryzen 7000HX family, AMD's highest-performance laptop CPU line that has been in production since mid-2023.

Coming in four unique SKUs, all aiming for high-end performance, the Ryzen 8000HX series comes in up to 16 cores and 32 threads, clocked at up to 5.4 GHz. The chips come with up to 80MB of total cache and are paired with Radeon 610M onboard graphics, a two-core graphics solution meant to be supplanted by a dedicated GPU.

Dragon Range Refresh was leaked several times by AMD partners before its announcement today, with MSI and Asus prematurely announcing the chips in their new products several times since January. Originally expected to be announced at CES 2025, the Ryzen 9 8940HX was prematurely leaked in a listing for the ROG Strix G16 2025 yesterday, confirming its stats and speeds.

As a refresh of the Dragon Range 7000HX series, the 8000HX doesn't offer anything consumers haven't seen before, besides a refined polish on a successful laptop CPU family. Built on the 5nm node, Dragon Range Refresh uses AMD's Zen 4 architecture to bring chiplet tech to high-end gaming laptops. Reviews of the 7000HX series found it to be a fierce competitor against lacking Intel competition, and the 8000HX is expected to be a continuation of the same impressive run.

The refresh doesn't seem to provide consumers with any serious boosts or differences in performance over Dragon Range's first go-around, as can be seen in the chart below. The only change visible from these basic speeds and feeds is a 100 MHz increase in boost clock to the Ryzen 9 8940HX from the 7940HX.

Part of Dragon Range Refresh seems to be consolidation. Where the Ryzen 7000HX series offered 7 SKUs, the refresh cuts this down to 4. We will be interested to see if 8000HX ever offers an X3D model like the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, but for now it does not seem like the case.

The refresh was also carried out with relatively little fanfare; where Intel's lackluster 2024 Raptor Lake Refresh was highly advertised and marketed, Dragon Range Refresh was heralded by a simple, graphic-less press release and a few new product pages on the AMD website. Clearly, the 8000 HX series is not seeking to be a bold new step for AMD, but a simple sidegrade, likely at some cost advantage thanks to reusing old wafer designs.

Major laptop brands will likely begin offering laptops containing the Ryzen 8000HX series soon. We already know from their leaks that MSI and Asus will be among the first to bring Ryzen 9 8940HX to market. Those looking for the best in laptop performance will likely seek out 8000HX, but those not needing the best and brightest can turn to now-last-gen 7000HX machines as long as they hang around.

Dallin Grimm is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has been building and breaking computers since 2017, serving as the resident youngster at Tom's. From APUs to RGB, Dallin has a handle on all the latest tech news.