AMD's next generation Ryzen mobile processor family is undergoing a significant re-positioning of IP within its product stack, as the company introduces the new "elite experience" segment. The "Fire Range" mobile processor is a direct successor to "Dragon Range" MCM, with two 8-core "Zen 5" chiplets. It is essentially a BGA package of the desktop "Granite Ridge" processor, and comes with up to 16 "Zen 5" cores, for flagship gaming notebooks and mobile workstations. A segment below the current "Dragon Range" is the current "Hawk Point" silicon, driving premium experiences. There is a rather large CPU performance gap between the two, as would be the case between the upcoming "Fire Range" and "Kraken Point," which is why AMD is creating the "elite experience" segment, and filling it with "Strix Halo" and "Strix Point," which will square off against Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 9 processors, as well as certain HX-segment 14th Gen Core mobile processors. "Strix Point" has a significant core-count increase to 12, along with a large iGPU. We've extensively covered "Strix Point" in our older article, but now we have more information on the elusive "Kraken Point."

"Kraken Point" is codename for AMD's next-generation monolithic mobile processor silicon being designed to power Ryzen processor SKUs competing against the bulk of Intel Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7 SKUs. This chip will be built on a refined 4 nm EUV node by TSMC, and will be monolithic. Its most interesting aspect is the CPU complex. It reportedly features a combination of four regular "Zen 5" cores, and four "Zen 5c" low power cores. All eight cores will likely share a single CCX, which means they share a common L3 cache, which enables easy movement of threads between the two kinds of cores, without having to make round-trips to the DRAM.

Everest (@Olrak29_) has kept track of many AMD processor families over the past couple of years—his latest insight provides an early look at the alleged internal makeup of Team Red's "Kraken Point" APU series. The rumor mill has designated these next-gen mobile processors as 2025 follow-ups to the recently launched Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" family of mainstream laptop APUs. The tipster's initial social media post only mentioned the presence of both Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores within Kraken Point processors, but he later clarified that a total of eight cores would include four large units and four smaller types. TPU's past coverage of Kraken Point pointed to rumors of an 8-core, 16-thread configuration, but leaked slides (from late 2023) did not mention the integration of efficiency-tuned Zen 5c "Prometheus" cores, along with presumed Zen 5 "Nirvana" cores.

Everest's continuous flow of insider information reveals that "Kraken Point" shares many "Hawk Point" traits—four workgroup processors (WGP) could be present on final retail products, granting eight compute units (8 CUs in total). He responded to a query regarding AMD's choice of integrated graphics technology—the succinct answer being RDNA 3.5. Past leaks allege that XDNA 2 will drive the NPU side of things—offering a performance range of around 45 to 50 TOPS. The Kraken Point APU is believed to be sticking with a safe monolithic die design, manufactured on a non-specific 4 nm process. Team Red is rumored to be in TSMC's order books for all sorts of next generation silicon.

With Windows 11 23H2 setting the stage for increased prevalence of AI in client PC use cases, the new hardware battleground between AMD and its rivals Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm, will be in equipping their mobile processors with sufficient AI acceleration performance. AMD already introduced accelerated AI with the current "Phoenix" processor that debuts Ryzen AI, and its Xilinx XDNA hardware backend that provides a performance of up to 16 TOPS. This will see a 2-3 fold increase with the company's 2024-25 mobile processor lineup, according to a roadmap leak by "Moore's Law is Dead."

At the very top of the pile, in a product segment called "ultimate compute," which consists of large gaming notebooks, mobile workstations, and desktop-replacements; the company's current Ryzen 7045 "Dragon Range" processor will continue throughout 2024. Essentially a non-socketed version of the desktop "Raphael" MCM, "Dragon Range" features up to two 5 nm "Zen 4" CCDs for up to 16 cores, and a 6 nm cIOD. This processor lacks any form of AI acceleration. In 2025, the processor will be succeeded with "Fire Range," a similar non-socketed, mobile-friendly MCM that's derived from "Granite Ridge," with up to two 4 nm "Zen 5" CCDs for up to 16 cores; and the 6 nm cIOD. What's interesting to note here, is that the quasi-roadmap makes no mention of AI acceleration for "Fire Range," which means "Granite Ridge" could miss out on Ryzen AI acceleration from the processor. Modern discrete GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD support AI accelerators, so this must have been AMD's consideration to exclude an XDNA-based Ryzen AI accelerator on "Fire Range" and "Granite Ridge."