AMD has announced a new mobile CPU family, the Ryzen 7045. Codenamed "Dragon Range," it is AMD's new flagship chip for high-performance laptops, scalable to 16 cores.

It is essentially a repackaging of the Ryzen 7000 series (open in new tab) already used in desktops, with the Zen 4 architecture and chiplet engineering, an I/O die and up to two CPU core dies.

It also has a tiny little 2CU RDNA 2 graphics core on the I/O die, just like the desktop Ryzen 7000. This graphics is, of course, not intended for gaming. For that, AMD has RDNA 3, also known as the new Radeon RX 7000 mobile chip (opens in new tab).

Returning to mobile CPUs, this new family of chips will top out at 5.4 GHz with the Ryzen 9 7945HX, which is a 16-core monster; AMD calls the 7045 series "the ultimate mobile gaming platform" and "the mobile creator's It is being touted as "the ultimate mobile gaming platform" and "a new frontier of performance for mobile creators.

The extent to which the new 7045 series focuses on pure performance rather than efficiency or battery life is underscored by the memory support offered. It is limited to DDR5 and does not support the more efficient LPDDR5. Don't expect a computer to have a battery that will last all day.

AMD says the new Ryzen 9 7945HX is up to 18% faster than the older Ryzen 9 6900HX on single-threaded workloads and 78% faster on multithreaded tasks. The big leap in multithreaded software is clearly thanks to the dramatic increase in core count from the Ryzen 9 6900HX's eight cores.

As for gaming, AMD estimates that the new chip is 29% to 62% faster than the Ryzen 9 6900HX, which is pretty eye-popping if accurate.

AMD announced four variants of the new processor: the 16-core 5.4GHz Ryzen 9 7945HX, as well as the 12-core 5.2GHz Ryzen 9 7845HX, 8-core 5.1GHz Ryzen 7 7745HX, and 6-core 5GHz Ryzen 5 7545 HX.

Early adopters of the Ryzen 7045 mobile would be the new Alienware M16 and M18 (open in new tab), Asus Strix, and Lenovo Legion. It is worth noting how much traction AMD has had with notebook makers recently.

Where once Intel dominated the market and AMD could only win a handful of laptop designs, we will see many systems offering these new CPUs, including all the major brands.

AMD has not announced pricing. In any case, mobile CPUs are often purchased with laptops and not separately. However, AMD has stated that the first laptops with the chip will ship in February.