Intel

AMD is purportedly preparing Ryzen 200 "Hawk Point Refresh" APUs — Ryzen 7 255/260 set to replace the Ryzen 7 8745H/8845H series

(Image credit: AMD)

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.

(Image credit: Weibo )

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.

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Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.