Best Buy listings show Ryzen AI 300 laptops coming on July 28 — retailer moves availability date back by two weeks

AMD’s latest Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point) chips are seemingly delayed after Best Buy moved back the availability date of Asus laptops that sport these chips by two weeks. Although Team Red did not give an exact release date for its latest laptop processors, multiple rumors have gone around saying that Ryzen AI 300 chips will be available on July 15, while the Ryzen 9000 processors will hit store shelves on the 31st of that month.

However, a hardware leaker posted yesterday on Weibo that AMD is moving its launch to July 28, thus bringing the launch of the latest AMD desktop chips closer. BestBuy now confirms this move, as multiple Asus laptops that sport Ryzen AI 300 processors have their release dates listed as July 28 after being set to July 15.

The retail giant did not give any reason for this delay. Since AMD did not give any timeline for the new chips’ launch dates except saying they’ll be available in July, the company is still on track with the new processors’ release schedule.

Many would likely be interested in AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips at launch. These are the first AI processors from Team Red to hit 50 TOPS of AI performance from its NPU. This is slightly higher than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite X chip, which only delivers 45 TOPS.

Even though the AMD AI processor has a higher NPU performance, it won’t enjoy Microsoft’s Copilot+ features at launch. Tom’s Hardware confirmed this with AMD, and we were told, “Yes, Copilot+ will come via a Windows Update later this year.” This means users who purchase a laptop with a Ryzen AI 300 processor must wait a few more months to enjoy Microsoft’s latest AI features.

Nevertheless, early benchmarks support AMD’s claims that its latest laptop CPUs gain 15% over the last-gen Ryzen 7 7735U. We also expect these APUs to have significantly better graphics performance as they upgrade their graphics engines with RDNA 3.5. However, all these benchmarks and numbers mean nothing if we can’t get our hands on these devices and run real-world benchmarks. So, we’ll have to wait until the end of July before we can start testing these laptops and comparing them against the new Snapdragon X Elite laptops launched a few weeks back.