AMD Launches A New Ryzen CPU That Was Only Rumored To Exist Until Now

hero lenovo xiaoxin pro 14

We’re big fans of AMD’s Phoenix and Hawk Point processors around these parts. A miniature monolithic die with eight fast Zen 4 CPU cores, a powerful RDNA 3 Radeon GPU, and a competent (if modest) XDNA NPU makes for tiny systems that can do just about anything a regular user wants to do. Any processor can have faults in any of its function blocks, though. What to do with Hawk Point dice with broken NPUs? Sell them anyway!

Some of these chips probably became Ryzen Z1 Extreme parts for handheld gaming systems, but AMD clearly has a fair few, as now Lenovo has become the first to launch a laptop based on the previously-rumored Ryzen 7 8745H processor. The machine is currently available only on the JD.com marketplace, which means it’s probably exclusive to the Chinese market, at least for now.
specifications
Specifications for the Ryzen 7 8745HS processor.

What’s special about this part? Nothing in particular, aside from that it’s Hawk Point without its NPU. Otherwise, the specifications are exceedingly similar to the Ryzen 7 8845HS, save that the peak boost clock rate is listed by Lenovo at 4.9 GHz—a 200 MHz chop from the 8845HS. There may potentially be other cuts elsewhere that aren’t reflected in the specifications on the laptop’s page, but we could only guess.
xiaoxin pro 14
Specifications for the Lenovo XiaoXin Pro 14 laptop.

The laptop, the Lenovo XiaoXin Pro 14, is priced on JD.com at 5499 RMB, which is right at $760. That’s not bad for a laptop with 24GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 2880×1800 OLED screen. It also comes with a massive 84-Wh battery—impressive even in a 14″ laptop without discrete graphics. However, another model on the page comes with an NPU-enabled Ryzen 7 8845H for just 100¥ more, or about $775, telling you exactly how much Lenovo values the NPU.

The only Phoenix or Hawk Point silicon that AMD sells stateside without its NPU is the aforementioned Ryzen Z1 Extreme; the standard Ryzen Z1 (as well as the Ryzen 5 8500G and 8400G) is based on the “Phoenix 2” chip, which is actually a completely different part that has a mixture of Zen 4 and Zen 4C dense cores. Clearly the lack of an NPU isn’t considered to be a great loss, so we doubt these chips would be much cheaper over here even if they did debut on US shores. Still, it’s an interesting release.

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