AMD is purportedly preparing Ryzen 200 "Hawk Point Refresh" APUs

AMD took the market by storm with its Phoenix APUs (Ryzen 7040) back in 2023 - based on the Zen 4 and RDNA 3 architecture. Last December, AMD revealed the Ryzen 8040 series, "Hawk Point," which was essentially rebadged Phoenix silicon packaged with a better NPU - still based on XDNA 1. Strix Point, which should've been the Ryzen 8050/9050 series, introduced Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 to the masses using a new Ryzen AI 300 moniker.

The leak suggests AMD is again refreshing Hawk Point (or re-refreshing Phoenix) under the Ryzen 200 series. It is also said that these APUs will lack an NPU, which could be a drawback for some customers as the NPU will likely be fused off - making them inferior to Hawk Point in silicon binning. From the Ryzen 200 lineup, we have the Ryzen 7 255 (rebadged Ryzen 7 8745H) and the Ryzen 7 260 (rebadged Ryzen 7 8845H) to counter Intel's upcomingArrow Lake-Hmobile family.

As for the specifications, the same leaker shared AMD'sentire mobile portfoliofor the upcoming two years, per which the Ryzen 200 APUs will seemingly pack up to eight Zen 4 cores alongside a 12 CU RDNA 3 iGPU (Radeon780M). The memory support remains unchanged at DDR5-5600/LPDDR5X-7500.

Customers should exercise great caution when purchasing a laptop this time around. Intel is refreshing Alder Lake with theCore 200H/Ulineup of CPUs. Likewise, AMD abandoned its traditionalnaming conventionand hopped on the AI bandwagon, the Ryzen AI 300 series. In tandem with the unintuitive and always-changing naming schemes - the sheer number of refreshes is bound to confuse many people who aren't as tech-savvy as us.