AMD shores up its budget laptop CPUs by renaming more years

As newer, more efficient silicon manufacturing processes have gotten more expensive and difficult to develop, chipmakers like Intel and AMD have repeatedly rebranded some of their older processors with new model numbers. This has allowed both companies to release “new” products that aren’t actually new at all, muddying the waters for people trying to buy lower-end and midrange laptops.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware , AMD has quietly rebranded a swath of its Ryzen laptop chips with new model numbers without changing the silicon. The rebranded processors use either Rembrandt-R silicon with Zen 3+ CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores or Mendocino silicon with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores. Both of these architectures first launched in 2022, but Mendocino’s Zen 2 CPU architect