AMD’s Ryzen 7000 Series Mobile Decoder Ring
To AMD’s credit, the company hasn’t tried to obfuscate anything and presses on exactly what each chip contains, down to the core architecture of both the CPU cores and the GPUs integrated into them. In fact, here’s this handy little chart outlining everything.
Going down the chart we have the Ryzen 7045 series, Ryzen 7040 series, Ryzen 7035 series, Ryzen 7030 series and Ryzen 7020 series. The “7” means “released in 2023”. In other words, all of this chart is coming up at some point this year so we should familiarize ourselves with the individual parts, for which let’s take a look at AMD’s 2023 mobile Ryzen lineup.
First of all, the Ryzen 7045 series. These processors are codenamed Dragon Range and are essentially the same chips as the desktop ‘Raphael’. That means 2 or 3 chiplets will give you 6 to 16 Zen 4 CPU cores, making them the world’s first chiplet-based laptop CPUs.
Interestingly, AMD is only doing performance comparisons with their previous generation hardware this time around. The company presents this list of gaming benchmarks with titles selected for maximum single thread sensitivity. These performance gains are certainly impressive, but when comparing AMD’s desktop Zen 4 performance to Zen 3’s performance, it’s a jump like we’ve seen before.
Along with the 16-core flagship, there are similarities to the rest of the desktop Raphael processors within the Ryzen 7045 lineup. AMD says it will be shipping laptops with these processors in February 2023. Indeed, while the Rembrandt-based AMD Ryzen 6000 CPUs were impressive, it was sometimes difficult to find laptop SKUs based on them. Hopefully the Dragon Range will be available with more OEM design wins.
Next up is the real star of the show, the Ryzen 7040 series. Codenamed “Phoenix” (or possibly “Phoenix Point”), these cutting-edge CPUs feature Zen 4 CPU cores and the same RDNA 3 graphics technology found in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, as well as the new “Ryzen AI ” processors. All on TSMC’s N4 process.
Entering AMD Ryzen AI with XDNA (Xilinx DNA)
What is Ryzen AI? It appears to be a block of Xilinx FPGA technology. AMD didn’t provide many details about the exact functionality of the programmable logic core, but said it’s a reconfigurable circuit built into a monolithic Phoenix die. The company says it can process four “dedicated AI streams” simultaneously and is “optimized for battery life in intense AI workloads.”
Real-world use cases can include all kinds of AI inference workloads, such as audio background noise reduction, image processing, computer vision, and more. This sort of thing can be done on CPUs and GPUs, but AMD stresses that using dedicated hardware for AI is far more efficient than using general-purpose computing, and in fact these This type of acceleration engine is also on the rise in Intel.
AMD has only announced 3 processors in the Ryzen 7040 series. It feels a bit weird to see a pair of 8-core chips split under the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 brand names but his Phoenix die only contains 8 CPU cores and AMD will likely be making quad-core Phoenix They probably didn’t want to ship it. Tip, it’s clear there weren’t many options there. Laptops with these CPUs should appear in his March.
Next up is the Ryzen 7035 series and AMD has shared few details. The 7035 series is known as “Rembrandt-R” and you can guess what the R stands for. (hint: it’s “refresh”). These chips are last year’s Ryzen 6000 Mobile processors revamped and refreshed for his 2023, with clearly higher clock rates.
While it may not be as exciting as new silicon, these processors offer great efficiency and high performance from both Zen 3+ CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics. In our testing, we were pleasantly surprised by the performance of the integrated Radeon 680M graphics.
Finally, we have the Ryzen 7030 series. AMD hasn’t said anything new about its Ryzen 7020 ‘Mendocino’ processors, so ‘finally’. These are the refreshed “Barceló” chips. Not widely reported.
Barcelo is a revised version of Cezanne, the processor used in the Ryzen 7 5000G series and many budget models in the Ryzen 6000 Mobile family. It has a Zen 3 CPU core, but the integrated graphics are based on the aging Vega architecture and manufactured on the old N7 process. AMD says they will use them for entry-level thin and light notebooks where performance is less important than price.
Just five years ago, AMD’s presence in laptops was strictly limited to low-end and low-power systems, but the company recently returned to the market with a roar of innovation. AMD has a full lineup of laptops across all price points and power levels heading into 2023, and the company’s Phoenix processors will also make its way to the desktop at some point. Integrated RDNA 3 graphics and AI We are curious to see what the processor can do and look forward to testing new AMD-powered laptops in the coming months.
