AMD Dragon Range “Ryzen 7045” CPUs Come With Various Power Optimizations Delivering Up To 54% Higher Efficiency Versus Raptor Lake

AMD recently launched its Ryzen 7045 CPUs for enthusiast laptops codenamed Dragon Range and they come with some unique power optimizations.

During its latest Meet The Experts Webinar, AMD revealed how its Dragon Range Enthusiast CPU lineup is not only the fastest in application workloads but also in gaming. In various benchmarks, the company shows the flagship Ryzen 9 7945HX leading against Intel's top 13th Gen Raptor Lake chips including the Core i9-13980HX and Core i9-13950HX.

But what's even more important is how efficient the new AMD Ryzen 7045 Dragon Range family is. We have seen a few reviews where the Dragon Range CPUs just obliterate Intel in terms of power efficiency. This is achieved through implementing some mobile optimizations that aren't present on the desktop SKUs.

The first trick to achieve the level of efficiency that AMD's Dragon Range "Ryzen 7045" CPUs offer is to adopt Voltage Range tuning which let AMD engineers go a little bit aggressive with the voltages used by the Dragon Range chips are handled.

On desktops, you certainly have more margin when it comes to voltage though, on mobile, you have to be more careful (AMD's words) which means that laptops run cooler, consume lower power, and also run a bit faster. We have seen Ryzen 7000 CPU lineup for desktops offering similar or better performance when undervolted and the same is the case here. The end result is getting a higher frequency across a larger number of points on the voltage curve.

How do we make it even more efficient so that it can work in a notebook? One of the things that we do is voltage range tuning. So on desktops, we do what we call allow a lot of margin on voltage curve, there's voltage and frequency curve, and we probably use a little bit more voltage than we need to because its desktop and we don't have to be too tight with it but if we are more careful about that and if we tune it specifically for mobile, we can lower voltages on that curve and that gives us a few things.

First of all less power which is very important in mobile but what's even equally important is that we produce less heat. When you produce less heat, you can run cooler and faster at the same time if your chip is capable of this kind of tuning and AMD's 7000 series absolutely are!

So we get a higher frequency across a larger number of voltage points compared to desktops and especially compared to the competition and that's one of our biggest advantages.

The second one, we introduced some intermediate memory states, something that we don't have on desktops but we added to the mobile version of this chip and this can save a ton of power that would otherwise be used up by memory or the IO die. So every little piece of it, even though Ryzen itself is an extremely efficient chip, desktop chip, we did more to it.

Another interesting optimization technique implemented on Dragon Range Ryzen 7045 CPUs is the Intermediate Memory States which optimizes power levels for the memory and the IOD, leading to increased battery times. The power is directly shifted to the cores which would have otherwise gone to the IOD and gotten wasted.

Lastly, AMD shows a new efficiency slide where the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX "Dragon Range" CPU is compared to the Intel Core i9-13980HX "Raptor Lake" CPU. In Cinebench R23, the Dragon Range chip delivers higher multi-threaded performance than its competitor while sipping in much lower power. The total efficiency gain is rated at an absolute monster, 54%.

The AMD Dragon Range CPUs are aimed at the high-performance laptop segment with more cores, threads, &  cache than what AMD has offered us previously while Phoenix Point will be aimed at the thin and light laptop segment.

The Dragon Range CPUs will have a TDP rating of around 55W-75W+ while Phoenix Point will have TDPs of around 35-45W. The 55W TDP is for the base configuration and we can expect the chip to be configurable up to 75W for laptop designs with high-end cooling and bigger form factors. The first Dragon Range laptops are already available and more configurations are expected to launch soon. These new designs will also be the first to feature new marketing logos colored orange that help distinguish between Zen 4 and older Zen CPUs on laptops.