AMD shores up its budget laptop CPUs by renaming more years-old silicon

That leaves AMD with four distinct branding tiers for laptop processors: the Ryzen AI 300 series, which uses all of the company’s latest silicon and supports Windows 11’s Copilot+ features; the Ryzen 200 series for processors originally launched in mid to late 2023 as Ryzen 7040 and Ryzen 8040; Ryzen 100 for Rembrandt-R chips first launched in 2022; and then a smattering of two-digit Ryzen and Athlon brand names for Mendocino chips.

These chips are still capable of providing a decent Windows (or Linux) experience for budget PC buyers—we were big fans of the Ryzen 6000 in particular back in the fall of 2022. But the practice of giving old chips updated labels continues to feel somewhat disingenuous, and it means that users who do want AMD’s latest CPU and GPU architectures (or neural processing units, for Copilot+ PC features) will continue to pay a premium for them.

If you want to squint hard and see an upside to this for PC buyers, it’s that if you can get a good deal on a refurbished or clearance PC using 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 issue, as always, is that stacking more brand names on top of old processors makes it that much more difficult to make an informed buying decision.