Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is on a roll currently thanks to both its well-received Ryzen AI series APUs in the mobile segment and its gaming performance leader, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which is extremely hard to find on shelves this holiday season. It is also expected to debut its mid-range Ryzen AI APU offerings during CES 2025 (Jan 7, 2025 to Jan 11, 2025) amongst other announcements, with the chip giant announcing a press conference for the 6th of the month.
While most of the details are under wraps, it seems a few overzealous testers might have jumped the gun by testing out AMD’s upcoming mid-range APU offerings ahead of release on PassMark, a popular PC hardware benchmark utility. Thanks to the benchmark, however (and a sample size of one), we do know more about AMD’s yet-unreleased CPU.
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The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350: A Mid-Range APU All-Rounder?
AMD already has three Ryzen AI APUs available for sale: the Ryzen AI 9 365, the Ryzen AI 9 370HX, and its slightly more AI-centric take on the latter, the Ryzen AI 9 370HX (with an additional five TOPs of compute power for AI applications). The team at Game Rant has already reviewed one of the laptops housing one of these chips (GR Review: ASUS ZenBook S16 Review: A Powerful Lightweight Contender) and found it to be both powerful and performant, even in a thermally restrictive environment.
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The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 is expected to be a cut-down version of AMD’s top-end Strix Point APUs listed above, offering an 8-core design (4 x Zen 5 cores and 4 x Mobile Zen 5c ‘compact’ cores) and a lower-end iGPU (AMD Radeon 860M). Thanks to the Passmark rating, we now have a good idea of where it sits in terms of performance.
The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350’s benchmarks point to a solid mid-range contender, but performance could vary based on how it is configured on a per-laptop basis, even as a single sample size does not inspire much confidence in its typical performance.
This comes as AMD continues to push its AI CPU narrative in a market that sees competition from a variety of competitors, such as a resurgent Intel and Qualcomm increase, even as its laptop CPU and APU market share is expected to increase in 2025 and beyond thanks to its computing lead in the x86 domain.
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Can You Use The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 APU To Game?
While the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 APU has a capable iGPU in tow (Radeon 860M) and fast single-core performance for a laptop APU, its performance is expected to generally be geared towards AI-centric productivity laptops that can occasionally game, but are somewhat restricted to lower graphics presets and resolutions.
This doesn’t make it one of the top contenders for gaming on the go when much more powerful discrete GPU-based alternatives exist, but it should allow users to play most MOBA titles at a reasonable frame rate once you dial down the settings.
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