For the second time in two years, AMD blows up its laptop CPU numbering system

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 9 AI 300 series is a new chip and a new naming scheme. (credit: AMD)

Less than two years ago, AMD announced that it was overhauling its numbering scheme for laptop processors. Each digit in its four-digit CPU model numbers picked up a new meaning which, with the help of a detailed reference sheet, promised to inform buyers of exactly what it was they were buying.

One potential issue with this, as we pointed out at the time, was that this allowed AMD to change over the first and most important of those four digits every single year that it decided to re-release a processor, regardless of whether that chip actually included substantive improvements or not. Thus a “Ryzen 7730U” from 2023 would look two generations newer than a Ryzen 5800U from 2021, despite being essentially identical.

AMD is partially correcting this today by abandoning the self-described “decoder ring” naming system and resetting to something more conventional.