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

That leaves AMD with four distinct brand 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 initially launching in mid-to-late 2023 as the Ryzen 7040 and Ryzen 8040; Ryzen 100 for Rembrandt-R chips first launched in 2022; then a handful of double-digit brands Ryzen and Athlon 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 in fall 2022. But the practice of giving older chips updated labels continues to seem somewhat disingenuous, and that means users who want AMD’s latest CPU and GPU architectures (or units neural processing, for Copilot+ PC features) will continue to pay extra for them.

If you want to squint and see one advantage 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 problem, as always, is that piling more brands onto older processors makes it that much harder to make an informed purchasing decision.