AMD Laptop Releases The Kraken With 8 Zen 5c Cores And 40 TOPS For AI Workloads

CES is next week and you can bet that there will be a bevy of beautiful hardware announcements, including many luxurious laptops sporting the latest processor designs. Apparently, Taiwanese ODM Elitegroup (better known to the DIY crowd as "ECS") couldn't wait though, and showed its hand early. In the company's communications were a trio of laptops, but the interesting part is that one of them is apparently based on an as-yet unreleased AMD processor.

Kraken Point, or "Krackan" as ECS writes it, is the SoC underpinning the ECS UP42KP, a 14-inch thin & light laptop design that seems to share its chassis with the UP42PW. That laptop is powered by eight-core Snapdragon X Plus SoCs, and that allows us to make certain assumptions about Kraken Point.


Only, we don't really have to because ECS lays out many of the specifications for the new chips right in its press release. According to ECS, "Krackan" is a "cutting-edge" AMD platform that supports up to eight Zen 5 CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics, and a powerful NPU with up to 40 TOPS of AI compute—rather similar to the NPUs in Snapdragon X Elite, Intel's Lunar Lake, and AMD's own Strix Point.

Of course, the reason the NPUs are so similar is because of Microsoft's requirements to refer to a machine as "Copilot+". We know a bit more about Kraken Point from leaks, though; assuming they're accurate, the RDNA 3.5 GPU has four WGPs, making it approximately the same width as the GPU in the Steam Deck (albeit considerably faster thanks to architectural advancements.)


One key detail of ECS' press release that conflicts with previous information is that the company describes the CPU configuration of "Krackan" as "8 Zen 5(c) CPU cores". It's not completely clear if the company is claiming that the chips have eight Zen 5c compact cores, or if the parenthetical "(c)" is meant to indicate that some of the cores are the dense configuration.

Earlier rumors described Kraken Point as a processor with a hybrid configuration consisting of four standard Zen 5 cores alongside four Zen5c cores. That would make it rather like a smaller version of the larger, twelve-core Strix Point chips launched last year that comprise the Ryzen AI 300 family. If it does indeed use eight Zen 5c cores instead, it might be quite a compact and power-sipping processor altogether.