AMD will bring Kraken Point APU next year

Next year, AMD will introduce Kraken Point to succeed the current Hawk Point, namely the Ryzen 8040 series. Concurrently, AMD is preparing an extensive APU lineup including Fire Range, Strix Point, and Strix Point Halo to compete in the mobile platform against Intel’s Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake chips.

Recent leaks suggest Kraken Point will feature a hybrid architecture, equipped with 4 Zen 5 cores and 4 Zen 5c cores, alongside an RDNA 3.5 architecture integrated GPU, manufactured using a 4nm process. It is claimed that laptop manufacturers can easily make Kraken Point compatible with the existing Hawk Point platform, as their designs are largely identical. Kraken Point will also be equipped with the XDNA 2 “Ryzen AI” engine, boasting nearly 50 TOPs of AI NPU performance to meet the demands of the AI PC ecosystem.

Compared to Strix Point, Kraken Point lacks 4 Zen 5c cores, presumably positioning it slightly lower in the product hierarchy. The exact number of Compute Units (CUs) for Kraken Point’s integrated GPU remains unclear; if it includes 8 or more, it could potentially become a platform of choice for numerous handheld gaming devices. Information indicates that, aside from Kraken Point, AMD is also preparing Escher, still based on the Zen 4 architecture, with 8 cores and an RDNA 3 architecture integrated GPU, also manufactured using a 4nm process, both slated for release in 2025.

If the leaked information holds, we might expect to see these chips in about a year, with AMD potentially revealing more details at CES 2025.