AMD promises ‘extreme gaming laptops’ in 2023 with new Dragon Range CPU

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The verge

The first gaming laptop to be won by the company was byAMD in 2020. We had never seen a laptop with an Intel Core i5 and an Intel Core i7 processor run circles around the competition. Since then, we've seen that the laptop is no longer cheap. The company just revealed that it is building a new processor that is aimed at thepinnacle of gaming performance.

The Dragon Range line will live at 55W and have enough power that they exist in.

Slide: AMD

The 35-45W line is aimed at machines that are at least 20mm thick, while the Phoenix line is for machines that are thinner than that mark. Both are part of the same Ryzen 7000 series, based on the same Zen 4 architecture, and unfortunately, it appears both won't arrive until 2023.

The same as the Ryzen 9 4900HS that impressed us at 35W will be used in Dragon Range. They are estimated to be more power efficient than other laptops in that competing time period.

It's not clear what the new CPUs might bring to the table that gaming laptops need, given that graphics chips are generally where most of the gaming oomph comes from. When you're trying to feed a high refresh rate monitor with lower-resolution frames, and the kind of gaming you want to do, the speed of the processor is important.

The company thought it could pursue the new chips with thin-and-light gaming.

Beginning next quarter, it will break out gaming into its own financial segment, with revenue from semi-custom parts like PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam Deck chips joining desktop and laptop Radeon graphics, all part of a single gaming business. The company will explain more at an analyst day in June.