AMD launches the Ryzen 9 7945HX, its first 16-core mobile CPU

Bottom line: AMD has announced its mobile Ryzen 7045HX series is available starting today. Codenamed Dragon Range, the series is the first to use AMD’s chiplet technology to reach 16 cores and is wickedly fast.

Dragon Range is a direct port of the desktop series to the mobile form factor and has the same CPU configurations: 16-core, 12-core, 8-core, and 6-core. Apart from the 7945HX, they all have configurable TDPs that start in the 45-75 W range and boost to around 5GHz in “bursty, single-threaded workloads” from 3+GHz base clocks.

The 7945HX demands its own power bracket: an unprecedented 55-75 W minimum. It has 16 cores — twice as many as the previous generation’s flagship, the 6900HX — along with a boost clock of 5.4GHz and 80 MB of combined L2 and L3 cache. For comparison, the 6900HX squeezed a 4.9GHz boost clock and 20 MB of cache into a 45 W envelope.

Dragon Range

AMD benchmarked the 7495HX against the 6900HX a short while ago and found it did 41 percent to 211 percent better in a mix of applications. In Cinebench R23, it was 22 percent faster in the single-threaded test and 123 percent faster in the multi-threaded test. AMD also compared its flagship against the older 16-core i9-12900HX and found the 7495HX was 18 percent to 169 percent faster in various benchmarks that were a bit favorable to the 7495HX.

But now AMD has shared some fairer comparisons between the 7495HX and one of Intel’s new CPUs, the i9-13950HX. It features eight p-cores and 16 e-cores, and clocks a little bit higher than the Ryzen part at 5.5GHz. It also consumes about 55 W by default but can be configured to jump up to 157 W under load. AMD tested the two CPUs in 31 titles and found that the 7495HX did better in 26 of them and was 10 percent faster on average.

Team Red was represented by an Asus Strix Scar G17 and Team Blue by a Gigabyte Aorus 17X. Both notebooks had 32 GB of DDR5 and an RTX 4090 under the hood.

Benchmarks from vendors like AMD are always prone to bias and mobile parts have especially variable performance because of their many configuration options and their dependency on cooling. AMD sounds a bit presumptuous calling the 7945HX the “world’s most powerful mobile processor” but we’ll concede that it’s a competitor for the title.

OEMs can start selling laptops equipped with the 7945HX, 7845HX, 7745HX, and 7645HX this weekend. AMD expects them to start appearing on shelves by the end of the week. The first models on the market are the M16 and M18 from Alienware, the Scar G17 and Zephyrus Duo from Asus, and the Legion 5 Pro and 7 Pro from Lenovo. More models will follow in the coming months, including from MSI, as will more mobile CPUs from AMD.