Summary
AMD’s recent Strix Point launch was one of its most solid ones in recent memory, and we’ve already seen a few Strix Point laptops making the rounds. If you don’t need the absolute best and most powerful, AMD is also launching a budget CPU that might catch your eye.
AMD has officially broadened its “Krackan Point” family of mobile processors with the introduction of the Ryzen AI 5 330. What’s Krackan Point if I just mentioned Strix Point, you might ask? It’s basically the same thing as Strix Point, but “entry-level,” if we can call it that way—AMD is keeping the “Strix” branding for its higher-end chips. Going into the chip itself, it’s a 4-core, 8-thread processor, composed of one high-performance Zen 5 core and three efficient Zen 5c cores. This is a substantial reduction from the Ryzen AI 5 340, which features a 6-core, 12-thread configuration. Ryzen 5 chips typically pack six cores and it has been this way for years, but a four-core CPU is probably fine for most people looking into getting basic work done.
This APU is equipped with a Radeon 820M GPU that has only two RDNA 3.5 compute units. This is probably suitable for general desktop use and 4K video playback but will offer limited performance for most gaming applications, so don’t expect to run any AAA games in here. It also has only 12MB of cache, which is low even by Krackan Point standards—the 340, just one tier above, has almost twice the cache, at 22MB. There are some advantages, though. For starters, it’s very, very light on power. Its TDP ranges from 15W to 28W. This is considerably lower than the 15W to 54W range of all other processors in the Ryzen AI 300 series, and means this thing barely sips power.
In single-core tasks, the Ryzen AI 5 330 is actually pretty good, with performance reportedly approaching that of older but higher-tier chips like the Ryzen 7 8840U. Since it only has four cores and three of them are efficiency-focused, though, multi-core performance will lag significantly behind other members of the Ryzen AI 300 family. If your particular workflow doesn’t hinge a lot on multi-core performance, this could be a nice option for you, but if you absolutely need more cores, you should look to spend a little more on a laptop that has one of the better chips in the range.
This chip is going to appear on thin-and-light laptops on the cheaper side anytime within the next few weeks or months—think laptops around the $500 price point or less.
