AMD is rumoured to be preparing a slightly cut-down version of its Ryzen 7 8845HS APU. This chip sees its XDNA NPU amputated, leaving the rest intact, which means it shouldn’t affect general performance.
According to hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade, AMD could be working on a variant of its Ryzen 7 8845HS Hawk Point APU with a disabled XDNA NPU (Neural Processing Unit). Dubbed Ryzen 7 8745HS, this chip should keep all the specs found on the 8845HS minus the artificial intelligence (AI) processing capabilities.
In other words, 8745HS should feature eight Zen 4 cores clocked up to 5.1GHz, plus 12 RDNA 3 compute units at 2.7GHz on the Radeon 780M iGPU. The chip should maintain its 35 to 54W configurable TDP as the missing XDNA NPU isn’t the most power-hungry part, as far as we know.
Moreover, since the AI capabilities of the mobile Ryzen 8000 chips weren’t enough to command a Microsoft Copilot+ certification, there won’t be any confusion regarding its AI capabilities. This is understandable since the entire chip – CPU, GPU, and NPU – is only capable of 38 TOPS of AI power, while Microsoft requires at least 40 TOPS for its Copilot+ feature. With the NPU missing, the AI capabilities of this processor drop by 16 TOPS, hitting 25 TOPS provided by the CPU and iGPU.
This is not the first time we see chip manufacturers, be it Intel, AMD, or Nvidia, cutting down partially defective silicon to save it from the landfill. However, this is the first time we’ve seen it happening on an NPU, since before the AI boom, desktop chips were mainly made of CPU cores and sometimes GPU units.
Even if this rumour is correct, which isn’t too farfetched, AMD may not release it to all manufacturers, pushing it as part of an exclusive brand deal due to the potential low stocks. It wouldn’t be the first time, since it recently offered Ryzen 5 5600X3D exclusively through Micro Center.