AMD 'Phoenix' mobile Zen 4 CPU: 'should rip through' games at 1080p

The latest information on AMD's upcoming mobile Zen 4 processors is floating out today, with details pumped out on "Dragon Range" and now "Phoenix".

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The new AMD Phoenix APU will offer a lower number of CPU cores compared to Dragon (Phoenix with up to 8 cores, Dragon with up to 16 cores) but instead, Phoenix will be a great balance of GPU and CPU performance. According to Red Gaming Tech, it "should rip through games at 1080p fairly easily".

AMD's new Phoenix chips will have an integrated RDNA 3 GPU with up to 12 CUs (Compute Units) and 6 WGPs (Work Group Processors). We're told to expect 2.6GHz to 3GHz for the integrated GPU clock speeds, while CPU and GPU core counts on the new RDNA 3-based Phoenix are identical to the RDNA 2-based Rembrandt APU. RDNA 3 has architecture changes and more underneath, so performance boosts will be interesting to see when AMD Phoenix-powered gaming laptops arrive later this year.

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As for the Zen 4-powered mobile CPU offerings, we have the Ryzen 9 7980HS with 8 cores (12 CUs + 6 WGPs) and the Ryzen 9 7900HS with 8 cores (12 CUs and 6 WGPs) but we should expect some CPU clocks + TDP tweaks between these two new AMD Phoenix chips. There's also the Ryzen 7 7800HS with 8 cores (12 CUs and 6 WGPs) as well as the Ryzen 5 7600HS with 6 cores (6 CUs and 3 WGPs).

We're told that the target for the highest end of the AMD Phoenix-based gaming laptops will be "about" the GeForce RTX 3060 mobile, but Red Gaming Tech also notes that the gaming and TFLOPs performance is for the higher TDP configurations (60W to 70W).

• Read more: AMD 'Dragon Range' mobile CPU: 4 new Zen 4 CPUs for laptops

Lower TDP variants of the AMD Phoenix processors will be available, with 35W models that will still perform excellently says Red Gaming Tech. We will also get next-gen PCIe 5.0 support which won't help out in the GPU department so much, but for super-fast storage... it'll make for an awesome content-creating machine on the go.

PCIe 5.0 enabled storage, with up to 8 cores of Zen 4 processing power with an integrated RDNA 3 GPU? Not bad, AMD. We're also told to have DDR5 and LPDDR5 support which has been "confirmed" by multiple sources says Red Gaming Tech, with a single source saying AMD Phoenix has LPDDR5X support, too, at up to LPDDR5X-8400.

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On the higher-end side the AMD Phoenix processors, we have the Ryzen 9 7980HX with 16 cores, the Ryzen 9 7900HX with 12 cores, the Ryzen 7 7800HX with 8 cores, and finally, the Ryzen 5 7600HX with 6 cores.