Portable gaming PC and laptop maker GPD recently announced pricing for the new Duo laptop with dual OLED displays. This PC promises to be one of the first devices based on the new hybrid processor (APU) from AMD – we are talking about the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 model of the Strix Point family, the price of which turned out to be unexpectedly high.
Image source: gpd.hk
GPD initially reported that the Duo would feature a Phoenix/Hawk Point hybrid processor based on Zen 4 architecture, but the computer’s specifications were subsequently updated. The manufacturer decided not to abandon the original option completely, and there was a reason for this: AMD decided to sell Strix Point chips to GPD at a price twice the cost of the Hawk Point processor (Ryzen 7 8840U). This forced her to reconsider whether the product could maintain enough margin to launch successfully.
GPD isn’t a big player in the laptop market, but with two OLED displays, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 version will cost $1,650 – for comparison, the Ryzen 7 8840U version is priced at $1,270. Direct comparison of them is not entirely correct: the older model has 32 GB of RAM versus 16 GB for the younger one, and the size of the built-in storage is 1 TB compared to 512 GB for the base version. But the price difference between Hawk Point and Strix Point raises concerns that the long-awaited Strix Halo will also increase significantly in price, pushing PCs running them out of the affordable range. And it is not yet clear whether the price for Strix Point is final, or whether manufacturers still have room for negotiations.
Perhaps the AMD Ryzen Z2 series of processors, expected to be released next year, will be more affordable. Otherwise, we should expect the price of portable gaming computers to rise. AMD is also working on Kraken series processors, which will feature eight Zen 5/5c cores and eight RDNA 3.5 compute units.