AMD has just pulled back the curtain on its Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs, but there is already talk about what comes next, with leaks suggesting that AMD's Ryzen 5000 series may combine a Zen 3 CPU core with an RDNA 2-based GPU core, These stories are getting even louder. This would be a major upgrade on both fronts.

Things can get confusing when dealing with codenames and model numbers, as AMD's mobile and desktop CPU lines do not completely align. Here's a cheat sheet:

I put an asterisk next to Zen 3 because these have not been officially announced; AMD could theoretically change the model names out of the blue, but I doubt that will happen.

Now, back to the rumors: a prominent Twitter leaker (@_rogame) found a post on the Anandtech forums highlighting Dell's documentation and mentioning AMD's next-generation Ryzen 5000 "Cezanne" mobile CPU. It's a bit of a rabbit hole.

The original poster removed the screenshots, saying that unlike the GitHub commit, the information was not intentionally leaked. However, they apparently refer to a Ryzen 5000 laptop with a Zen 3 CPU core combined with RDNA 2-based Navi 23 graphics

Whether this means AMD's Ryzen 5000 mobile series will have integrated RDNA 2 graphics or that it will be slipped into the laptop by means of a discrete graphics chip. Either way, it will be a big deal.

AMD has chosen to stick with the outdated Vega graphics architecture in its recently announced Ryzen 4000 mobile series. This is the only disappointing aspect of the announcement, as anyone serious about gaming would have opted for a laptop with discrete graphics anyway. That said, Nvidia has promised a $999 laptop with a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU. Still, it will be nice to see AMD put Vega graphics in the rearview mirror.

It would be even nicer to see RDNA 2 in discrete form on an AMD laptop next year. To add a bit of context, the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, both due out later this year, will both come with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics. This means that next year's AMD notebooks could have better performance than both next-generation game consoles.

AMD's RDNA 2 architecture will also provide hardware support for real-time ray tracing. This is another nice perk for gaming on laptops; on the CPU side, Zen 3 could bring a significant improvement in IPC (instructions per clock) performance.

Nothing is set in stone, of course, but at the very least AMD's next-generation laptops have the potential to be game changers.