A new mobile Ryzen 9 CPU might just have made its first appearance in a benchmark, bringing 12 Zen 4 (opens in new tab) cores to laptops for the first time. If it exists, that is. This is definitely a rumor, for now, coming as it does from hardware leaker Benchleaks’ Twitter account (opens in new tab).
[AOTS] Unknown CPUCPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX (24T)GPU: Radeonhttps://t.co/PCW87b3xArNovember 14, 2022
The purported AMD Ryzen 9 7845HX APU appears in a benchmark listing (opens in new tab) for Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, a strategy videogame with a reputation for being hard on the processing cores. The rig appears to use the integrated Radeon GPU, has 8GB of RAM, and ran the game at 1080p under DirectX 11 with its graphics settings on ‘crazy,’ which is the level above ‘extreme.’ It averaged just over 50fps.
With 12 cores and 24 threads – appearing in the benchmark as 24 cores, as was the case with the 12-core 7900X – this is the first Ryzen HX processor to be equipped with more than eight cores. HX processors were added to AMD’s range in the Ryzen 5000 generation and signify even greater performance than the ‘normal’ H series, which are high-performance mobile APUs. The mainstream mobile APUs get a U on the end of their name, while an M series chip is for low-power mobile.
Videocardz speculates that this could mean the Ryzen 9 7845HX is a repurposed desktop model, and it certainly could be a member of the Dragon Range (opens in new tab) family announced back in June. This makes it one of the first mobile chips to be identified using AMD’s new naming convention (opens in new tab): the 7 at the beginning signifies 2022, the 8 is its market segment, and can confusingly mean it’s either a Ryzen 7 or 9 (though the CPU name is pretty clear). The 4 is for the Zen 4 architecture, and the 5 means it’s the upper model in its segment – a lower-class chip would have a 0 here.
Direct comparisons are hard to find, as most other benchmarks on the site show AMD HX chips from earlier generations running discrete GPUs, using DirectX 12 or Vulkan, or having their graphics options set completely differently. A 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X using the integrated GPU under Vulkan and with 32GB of RAM managed an average score of 112FPS, for example, suggesting DirectX 11 isn’t the best API to really show off the new chip’s capabilities.
