AMD's Ryzen 8000HX refresh couldn't come at a better time — Affordable gaming CPUs arrive as laptop prices rise

AMD's new Ryzen 8000HX mobile processors could be the perfect chips for a 2025 blanketed in tariffs and rising tech costs.

The new "Dragon Range Refresh" lineup includes four high-performance CPUs designed for laptops; they're successors to AMD's original "Dragon Range" Ryzen 7000HX mobile chips that first launched in 2023.

Gamers who groan at the idea of shelling out for a CPU that includes a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for local AI work — which often goes unused on a gaming laptop — will be particularly interested.

AMD's "Dragon Range Refresh" mobile CPUs

Those who have followed AMD's laptop CPU lineup will quickly spot some similarities between the 7000 and 8000 chips. In fact, they're almost identical.

The newer 8000HX options still use AMD's Zen 4 architecture — AMD has moved on to Zen 5 for its Ryzen 9000 chips — and they're still built on a 5nm node.

There's also no change to the integrated Radeon 610M GPU, which boasts two RDNA 2 GPU cores.

That doesn't matter as much considering these chips are intended for use in laptops with a separate discrete GPU.

Here's a look at how the two generations compare.

The only difference I can see in the chart above is a 0.10GHz improvement on the Ryzen 9 8940HX's boost frequency.

It's worth mentioning that the Ryzen 7000 HX series originally launched with two Ryzen 9 chips, one Ryzen 7, and one Ryzen 5.

Part of AMD's restructuring for 8000 HX sees the Ryzen 5 dropped in lieu of a second Ryzen 7 8745HX CPU with 8 cores.

AMD's Ryzen 7000HX series eventually grew to seven total chips. The Ryzen 9 7945HX3D brought AMD's awesome 3D V-Cache technology to high-end gaming laptops, significantly boosting gaming performance.

AMD could once again grow its Ryzen 8000HX stable after this initial four-chip launch, but it'll likely depend on demand and popularity.

AMD's lack of fanfare makes sense

AMD's new Ryzen 8000HX mobile CPUs arrived without much fanfare, which makes sense once you see the SKUs.

The new "Dragon Range Refresh" chips are certainly not a major upgrade over their predecessors. Instead, AMD looks to be focusing on affordability with these new chips.

While the Zen 5 HX mobile series — including the mighty Ryzen 9 9955HX and Ryzen 9 9850HX — will continue to offer the best performance, 8000HX should be an excellent stopping point along the way for many gamers.

That's more important than ever in a tech market thrown into chaos by tariffs that are raising laptop prices.

In response, Acer announced a laptop price hike, and Razer notably halted sales of gaming laptops in the US.

Most other laptop companies that deal out of China are now scrambling to figure out what to do with tariffs reaching up to 145%.

Our Tariffs live blog has a lot more information on the subject, and we're keeping it updated with the latest news.