The spotlight might be on AMD's latest Ryzen AI 300 series processors, but the CPU manufacturer is still not finished adding more SKUs to its older Ryzen 8000 series product stack. Golden Pig, a reputable hardware leaker, on the Weibo forums, leaked that AMD is planning to release a new Ryzen 7 8845HS variant in the near future with a disabled XDNA NPU, dubbed the Ryzen 7 8745HS.
This isn't the first time AMD has turned off its neural processing unit. The manufacturer's Ryzen 3 and some of its Ryzen 5 desktop and mobile chips lack NPU capabilities for product segmentation. However, the introduction of AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS will be the first time this type of product segmentation occurs at the higher end of AMD's product stack.
The outgoing Ryzen 7 8845HS has eight Zen 4 cores and 16 threads, a 5.1GHz turbo frequency, and a configurable 35-54W TDP. Integrated graphics comes in the form of AMD's Radeon 780M iGPU with 12CUs and AI-hardware acceleration, of course. It also comes with AMD's first-generation XDNA NPU with 16 TOPS performance (38 TOPS total, counting the NPU, CPU, and GPU combined).
The Ryzen 7 8745HS will inevitably feature the exact specifications as the 8845HS, with the XDNA NPU chopped off. However, we could also see some slight clock speed changes to provide further segmentation. We wouldn't be surprised if AMD lopped off 100-200MHz clock speed on the 8745HS to make the chip less competitive with the 8745HS. It is scarce for two SKUs in the same lineup to sport the exact core count and clock speed.
It might seem pointless for AMD to make another SKU purely without an XDNA chip inside, but more likely than not, AMD is releasing the AMD 7 8745HS to sell off defective Zen 4 silicon that might not have a functioning NPU. Selling defective silicon with non-working components is something Intel and AMD have done for years and is an intelligent way of reducing waste. Chips with disabled cores, like the Ryzen 5 7600, or disabled iGPUs like the 'F' and 'KF' series from Intel, likely use defective silicon with the disabled bits making up the faulty components. Generally, when AMD gets enough defective dies, it will go out of its way to turn them into an SKU of its own. AMD did this with the Ryzen 5 5600X3D, which used exclusively defective Zen 3 dies destined to be Ryzen 7 5800X3Ds.
The Ryzen 7 8745HS could have widespread adoption depending on how integration goes with OEMs. If AMD prices the 8745HS right, it could be a much cheaper alternative to the 8845HS, with virtually the same performance. AI workloads are still a niche segment, especially when users can access AI tools such as Copilot directly from the web. So, there's little reason for the Ryzen 7 8745HS not to be successful, even with the lack of an NPU.
