AMD shores up its budget laptop CPUs by renaming more years-old silicon

As newer, more efficient silicon manufacturing processes have gotten more expensive and difficult to develop, chipmakers like Intel and AMD have repeatedly rebranded some of their older processors with new model numbers. This has allowed both companies to release “new” products that aren’t actually new at all, muddying the waters for people trying to buy lower-end and midrange laptops.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, AMD has quietly rebranded a swath of its Ryzen laptop chips with new model numbers without changing the silicon. The rebranded processors use either Rembrandt-R silicon with Zen 3+ CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores or Mendocino silicon with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores. Both of these architectures first launched in 2022, but Mendocino’s Zen 2 CPU architecture dates all the way back to 2019. During the company’s model number decoder ring era, these designs had been sold as Ryzen 7035- and Ryzen 7020-series chips, respectively.

This is actually AMD’s second rebranding for the Rembrandt-R silicon, which was launched as the Ryzen 6000 series in 2022. These chips will compete most directly with Intel’s non-Ultra Core 100 series processors, most of which use 2022-vintage Raptor Lake silicon.