News AMD Dragon Range Refresh CPU specs confirmed via early retail listing — Ryzen 9 8940HX sees 100 MHz increase

[Admin]

AMD's Dragon Range Refresh CPU family has had more details revealed thanks to a new Asus listing on a Chinese retailer.

AMD Dragon Range Refresh CPU specs confirmed via early retail listing — Ryzen 9 8940HX sees 100 MHz increase : Read more

 

[abufrejoval]

I guess they could just have these CCDs still in inventory, potentially really good bins and EPYC candidates and they are now clearing them out at the best possible price.

Just increasing the number on the chips helps an illusion of getting a slightly improved chip.

And they do get better later in the game, I still fondly remember some golden bin 45nm Penryns sold as Xeons which clocked incredibly high yet barely got warm, while I also had an early one that would do zero overclock and ran much hotter: truly a world apart!

And yes, it's a good one as I can attest, even with a 7945HX number on top that I got on a Minisforum board at economy pricing.

I'd really just like to know if they were already packaged for the mobile form factor or are freshly assembled to hit that popular mobile-on-desktop market. While it has always been a very good choice for a mobile workstation with a potent GPU, that's both a small market and it was way too dominated by Intel Raptor lakes: AMD might have just made too many fully assembled Dragon Range CPUs, or or be using a late opportunity...

And that is mostly just curiosity, I'd love to better understand the logistics involved: AMD has a tons of potential flexibility deciding the fate of CCDs early or late, but not all options might actually be economically attractive. And while in theory they could package late, those production lines also may not be that easy to spin up or adjust between server/desktop/mobile lines, giving much less real-world flexbility than the modular approach seems to offer.

And the they could also be late wafer starts for both CCDs and IODs for all we know: perhaps they come with huge rebates from TSMC on these older nodes now.

So many options, so few insights!

I see you don't have a clue, either, but I'd think you're better equipped to find out than me.

 

[usertests]

So many options, so few insights!

So many words!

It's not unusual for AMD to produce annual refreshes of mobile chips, even if they aren't much better. OEMs may demand it. Ryzen 7000 was crazy with Barcelo-R (Cezanne Refresh Refresh), Rembrandt-R, and Phoenix. Even now we have Ryzen 200 series which is a Hawk Point Refresh (Phoenix Refresh Refresh).

I don't think they need to work very hard to accumulate a stockpile of dies than can clock 100 MHz higher, it's just likely to be achievable since both the process nodes and the chip steppings can be slightly refined over their lifetimes.

It's great for AMD that they can divert chiplets to server, desktop, or mobile, and there's probably no way to know what's going on behind the scenes. This may only increase as Zen 6 CCDs are rumored to be going into the mainstream APUs (Medusa Point). This could also mean more products sharing the same 3D cache chiplets, which are in high demand.