This leaves AMD with four distinct tiers of its laptop processor brand: the Ryzen AI 300 series, which uses all of the company's latest chips and supports Windows 11 Copilot+ features; Ryzen 200 series of processors, originally released in mid-to-late 2023 as Ryzen 7040 And Ryzen 8040; Ryzen 100 for Rembrandt-R chips first released in 2022; and then some double-digit Ryzen and Athlon brands for Mendocino chips.
These chips are still capable of delivering a decent Windows (or Linux) experience for budget PC buyers—we were big fans of the Ryzen 6000 in particular. still in autumn 2022. But the practice of giving older chips an updated label still seems a little disingenuous, and it means that users who really want AMD's latest CPU and GPU architectures (or neural processors for Copilot+ PC features) will continue to pay more for them.
If you want to look closely and see this as a positive for PC buyers, if you can get a good deal on a refurbished or clearance PC with Ryzen 6000, Ryzen 7035, or Ryzen 7020 chips, you're still technically getting the latest and greatest processors that AMD is willing to sell you. The problem, as always, is that placing more brands on top of older processors makes it much more difficult to make an informed purchasing decision.
