back to article AMD follows Intel's lead with alphanumeric soup of new Ryzens

AMD has revealed an expanded family of Ryzen 7000 processors for laptops and desktops, and, more than ever before, they resemble the alphanumeric soup Intel deploys on its array of PC chips. Announced at CES, the new chips include three Ryzen desktop CPUs with AMD's 3D V-Cache technology, which the company claimed are the " …

  1. Gene Cash Silver badge

    They're worse than the old chips

    "You can no longer easily figure out how the latest notebook chips compare to previous generations because the older parts are numbered differently"

    Yes. So then the new chips are probably not any better than the old ones. If they were, AMD wouldn't be doing this because they'd be trumpeting how much better this year's X chip was than last year's X chip. They wouldn't be obfuscating it.

  2. Dave 126 Silver badge

    > You can no longer easily figure out how the latest notebook chips compare to previous generations

    Google the chip name and click on the resulting notebookcheck.net link. Easy enough.

    The prospective buyer would do better to compile a list of likely CPUs than to try and remember them by name anyhows. And having made a list, they might as well make it a spreadsheet. Price, performance in most applicable benchmarks, power consumption, which laptops feature which chip... the human brain isn't the best storage medium for this sort of data, not when you've got a sodding computer in front of you.

    1. Wellyboot Silver badge

      There are also a nice set of lists at cpubenchmark.net

      The overlap between top end Gen12 i7 & i9 laptop models boils down to the i9 performance core clock starting out (base) at 20% faster with the gap coming down to only 4% by the time they max out towards 5GHz. I'll be surprised if this new set are any different.

    2. Korev Silver badge

      > Google the chip name and click on the resulting notebookcheck.net link. Easy enough.

      For the typical El Reg reader yes, but for non-technical people it'd be much harder

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Non-technical people who are fussy about which CPU they have? Okay I'm joking, but only a bit! :)

        Non-technical people, very reasonably, might express their wish as "I want a new laptop cos my current one is getting slow, and it'd be nice to have the battery last most of the day, and my mate's laptop seems a bit lighter than mine"

        Apple get it, and usually describe their new processors on stage as being "30% faster at X than last year's model". (They then put the details of gigawotsits and cores in the press pack for the technical folk, knowing full well most technical folk will ignore the presentation and wait for for 3rd party benchmarks anyway.)

        I guess my point is, even if AMD's naming scheme was sane, there would still be too many competing values - price, base speed, burst speed, single thread speed, core count, special features, efficiency - for a buyer, technical or otherwise, to keep in their head. They're better off writing down a list of CPUs that meet their requirements - on a spreadsheet, on a piece of paper, on papyrus or a wax tablet if they have to - and weigh their budget against a laptop's other aspects such screen quality, lightness, etc.

        And of course, whatever laptop the customer eventually buys, there'll be a better, faster one available for less money a week later!

        1. katrinab Silver badge
          Gimp

          The other thing is that Apple just has Regular, Pro, Max, and Ultra chips, in binned and non-binned variants.

          You don't get Ultra in laptops. You don't get Pro (for whatever reason) in desktops. So you only have to compare 3x2 different options.

          I say 3x2 rather than 6 because there isn't that much difference between the binned and non-binned variants of each chip.

  3. Chz

    It takes some working to be less clear than Intel's consumer CPU nomenclature. At least there's a rough correlation of "bigger is better" that's not always true of the Ryzen scheme, even if there's some recycling of Alder Lake parts in Gen.13.

    But at the same time, it's still far, far clearer than Intel's server CPU names. I challenge anyone who doesn't have to work with it daily to figure out what in god's name a particular Xeon is.

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Joke

      > I challenge anyone who doesn't have to work with it daily to figure out what in god's name a particular Xeon is.

      It's a Nobel gas isn't it?

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        It wasn't me who downvoted you, but maybe whoever did was clumsily trying to say:

        "Nobel gasses are snobby and don't like forming molecules with peasant elements, whereas Nobel was a man who created explosives that only went Bang! when they were told to and not just whenever they felt like it. (The people who used explosives considered this feature a big improvement to the User Experience, and the product became a huge commercial success. If there ever were users who opined "you're just paying the Nobel idiot-tax, I can get a much bigger bang for my buck, Dynamite's for noobs!" we will never know. )"

        At least I think that's what your downvoter was trying to say. His chosen medium of communication, upvote downvote, is of very narrow bandwidth.

    2. katrinab Silver badge
      Trollface

      That's easy. It is something you should pass over in favour of a Threadripper or Eypc.

      Maybe the really low-end Xeons might have a use-case if you need the memory channels or PCIe lanes and don't care about performance, but other than that, I don't see any reason to buy them.

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