
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!


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.