AMD Dragon Range Refresh CPU specs confirmed via early retail listing — Ryzen 9 8940HX sees 100 MHz increase

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Details of AMD's poorly kept secret continue to leak ahead of the official announcement.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 2023
(Image credit: Asus)

AMD's upcoming Dragon Range Refresh CPU family has had some new details revealed by a recent early listing on Chinese retailer site JD.com. The existence of the Dragon Range Refresh, or the Ryzen 8000HX line, has been known about since MSI leaked the news in January.

The JD listing for an Asus laptop featuring the upcoming ROG Strix G16 2025 has been widely shared through screenshots on Weibo. The screenshot below has been widely shared and confirmed by numerous places. The new G16 lists a Ryzen 9 8940HX as its CPU, alongside an RTX 5070 Ti, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

Asus ROG Strix G16 with Ryzen 9 8940HX

(Image credit: JD.com via Weibo)

The Ryzen 9 8940HX, a part of the presumed Dragon Range Refresh, is expected to replace the Ryzen 9 7940HX. The G16 listing continues beyond the screenshot to share that the 8940HX will be a 16-core/32-thread chip that boosts up to 5.3 GHz. That represents a 100 MHz improvement over the 7940HX's 5.2 GHz boost clock, typical for a generational refresh.

We've seen the Ryzen 9 8940HX before in a premature Best Buy listing for the same Asus laptop, also paired with the then-unreleased RTX 5070 Ti. The prices also line up, with the ¥13,999 price tag seen above converting exactly to the same $1,899 price tag the Strix G16 carried in January. This hopefully will not be the cheapest way to acquire an 8940HX, as the 7940HX can currently be had for under $1,200 in laptops and mini PCs, though Asus's Strix line often carries a luxury tax that should be accounted for.

AMD, strangely enough, has still not officially announced Dragon Range Refresh. MSI first dropped a premature press release featuring the 8000HX series during CES 2025, with Asus listing the Strix G16 2025 a week later; both listings were quickly removed after AMD declined to issue a release on the new CPUs.

Now that the Strix G16 has been listed a second time, perhaps also erroneously, it remains for AMD to announce their refresh line or remain secretive. The Dragon Range Refresh has definitively had its thunder stolen, though what thunder it could've had as a refresh of a two-year-old laptop-only CPU family no one knows.

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Dallin Grimm
Dallin Grimm
Contributing Writer

Dallin Grimm is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has been building and breaking computers since 2017, serving as the resident youngster at Tom's. From APUs to RGB, Dallin has a handle on all the latest tech news. 

2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • abufrejoval
    I guess they could just have these CCDs still in inventory, potentially really good bins and EPYC candidates and they are now clearing them out at the best possible price.

    Just increasing the number on the chips helps an illusion of getting a slightly improved chip.

    And they do get better later in the game, I still fondly remember some golden bin 45nm Penryns sold as Xeons which clocked incredibly high yet barely got warm, while I also had an early one that would do zero overclock and ran much hotter: truly a world apart!

    And yes, it's a good one as I can attest, even with a 7945HX number on top that I got on a Minisforum board at economy pricing.

    I'd really just like to know if they were already packaged for the mobile form factor or are freshly assembled to hit that popular mobile-on-desktop market. While it has always been a very good choice for a mobile workstation with a potent GPU, that's both a small market and it was way too dominated by Intel Raptor lakes: AMD might have just made too many fully assembled Dragon Range CPUs, or or be using a late opportunity...

    And that is mostly just curiosity, I'd love to better understand the logistics involved: AMD has a tons of potential flexibility deciding the fate of CCDs early or late, but not all options might actually be economically attractive. And while in theory they could package late, those production lines also may not be that easy to spin up or adjust between server/desktop/mobile lines, giving much less real-world flexbility than the modular approach seems to offer.

    And the they could also be late wafer starts for both CCDs and IODs for all we know: perhaps they come with huge rebates from TSMC on these older nodes now.

    So many options, so few insights!

    I see you don't have a clue, either, but I'd think you're better equipped to find out than me.
    Reply
  • usertests
    abufrejoval said:
    So many options, so few insights!
    So many words!

    It's not unusual for AMD to produce annual refreshes of mobile chips, even if they aren't much better. OEMs may demand it. Ryzen 7000 was crazy with Barcelo-R (Cezanne Refresh Refresh), Rembrandt-R, and Phoenix. Even now we have Ryzen 200 series which is a Hawk Point Refresh (Phoenix Refresh Refresh).

    I don't think they need to work very hard to accumulate a stockpile of dies than can clock 100 MHz higher, it's just likely to be achievable since both the process nodes and the chip steppings can be slightly refined over their lifetimes.

    It's great for AMD that they can divert chiplets to server, desktop, or mobile, and there's probably no way to know what's going on behind the scenes. This may only increase as Zen 6 CCDs are rumored to be going into the mainstream APUs (Medusa Point). This could also mean more products sharing the same 3D cache chiplets, which are in high demand.
    Reply