Laptops featuring AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series "Strix Point" CPUs will launch on July 15, two weeks ahead of a July 31 launch date for the Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" CPUs. That's according to leaks and information from several sources indicate, including laptop listings from Best Buy found by Twitter by user @9550pro, and WCCFTech found Ryzen 9000 series pricing Canada Computers and a Philipine site; B&H Photo also has a Ryzen 9 9950X listing "coming soon."
In addition to these retail listings, AMD updated its 3D V-Cache optimizer driver last week. That's linked to Ryzen 9000X3D parts, which seems set to further iterate on past X3D CPUs and their boosted gaming performance, but we don't expect the X3D variants to arrive until at least a few months after the initial Zen 5 parts. July 31 will seemingly be the launch date for the Ryzen 9000 non-X3D processors.
Pricing details stem from non-U.S. listings, so we have to convert those to USD to get estimated MSRPs. The least expensive parts appear to start at around $300 USD for the Ryzen 5 9600X, and range up to $600 USD for the Ryzen 9 9950X. There's probably about $20 leeway, up or down, for the U.S. retail launch. Note that the numbers come from Canada Computers and Bermor Techzone in the Philipines, while B&H doesn't yet show a price.
The Ryzen AI 300 CPUs will of course only be sold in laptops, but the Asus Zenbook S 16 listing on Best Buy shows a Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU with a 3K OLED touchscreen for $1,399 USD. That also includes 24GB of memory and a 1TB SSD.
We've seen benchmarks from GPD for its own GPD Duo Dual OLED laptop with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, likely a slightly faster option than the 365. The new mobile chips could outpace the desktop Ryzen 9 5950X in CPU performance, with integrated graphics performance slotting between the mobile Nvidia RTX 2050 and RTX 3050 GPUs. Those are only estimates based on 3DMark, however, where the score of 4,221 for the Radeon 890M iGPU reported by GPD indicates a 33% lift in performance over the previous generation Radeon 780M iGPU.
Overall, AMD's upcoming refresh cycle looks pretty enticing, for desktop and laptop users alike. We'll have to see how the laptops stack up against the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite solutions when we have hardware in hand, but the rumored performance gains look good while remaining price-competitive with previous solutions.
