It wasn’t that long ago that the concept of a high-end laptop with an AMD CPU was a laughable proposition. Right now the company is completely competing with Intel’s best, at least on the high end.For laptops with lower power limits than AMD’s Ryzen 7045 series, AMD is launching its monolithic his Ryzen 7040U series. Released today.
that’s right. These processors will be the second wave of Phoenix-based chips to hit the market. His Ryzen 7040 series, announced at this year’s CES, is a family of what were once called ‘APUs’. These are his SoCs that achieve a balance between CPU and GPU performance, codenamed “Dragon Range.”
Specifically, the models launching today will have a ‘U’ suffix to indicate they’re typically configured for a lower power limit than the power hungry 7040HS processor announced at CES. . By the way, they are already available.Like this, you can actually buy now ASUS ROG 14″ model with Ryzen 9 7940HS and 165 Hz display at Best Buy. Lenovo’s Legion Slim 7 should also be available anytime.
Like the ‘HS’ processors, the 7040U series will feature 4 to 8 Zen 4 CPU cores running at 5.1 GHz clock speeds, up to 6 RDNA 3 workgroup processors (12 CU), and an AMD XDNA AI accelerator get all Packed into a TDP as low as 15W, at least for these first “-U” models. In fact, AMD doesn’t say much, but this is almost certainly the exact same silicon found in his Ryzen Z1 chip aimed squarely at handheld PCs.
So before we look at AMD’s claims about the efficiency and performance of these CPUs, let’s take a look at the actual models announced today. AMD has four new parts for your viewing, located next to the existing “HS” parts in the table below.
Compared to the Ryzen 7040HS processor, these -U models have a significantly lower base clock rate. Ghz for Ryzen 5 7640U. This affects multi-core performance, but the boost clock barely changes.
But that’s not all. -U series processors cut more than half the L3 cache from 32MB to just 16MB on most models and just 8MB on the Ryzen 3 7440U. Additionally, his 7040U chip on the low end is starting to lose a good chunk of its GPU horsepower. In addition to the obvious drop in compute units, all but the Ryzen 7 7840U also lose half of their rendering backend.
Finally, only half of the 7040U series can sustain XDNA-based Ryzen AI coprocessors. Of course, the ‘X’ in XDNA stands for Xilinx, and it’s not entirely clear what the on-chip AI processor actually does, but according to AMD, Windows 11’s Studio Effects Pack offers a set of filters and effects that you can apply. is. Accelerated by Ryzen AI to save CPU or GPU time.
The biggest change, of course, is the lower TDP. The Ryzen 7040HS models were rated between 35 and 54 watts, but the -U series here starts at 15 watts and caps at just 30. Forget if I didn’t point out that “-U” as a specification is usually reserved for processors at the bottom of that range. However, AMD itself tacitly acknowledges this by comparing these CPUs to the Core i7, a 25-watt Intel CPU. -1360P.
In that matchup, AMD claims to be 29% to 128% faster than Intel CPUs. This is when comparing the top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 7840U to Intel’s chip. But what about his Apple kids, power efficiency gurus, and how does it compare to ARM’s competitors?
Pretty positive, at least according to AMD’s own numbers. In the company’s tests with the Cinebnech R23, Passmark 10, Mozilla Kraken, PugetBench, and Blender, its new chip consistently wins against Apple’s portion last year, especially in Cinebench and Passmark. AMD didn’t disclose the TDP configuration used for testing, but it’s not a bad result. Apple’s part has a TDP of 20W.
Of course, no AMD launch would be complete without mentioning gaming performance. His APUs from AMD have always delivered incredible graphics performance, at least as far as integrated graphics are concerned. The company doesn’t provide hard numbers on gaming performance, but the Radeon 780M provides strong sound for the Iris Xe graphics inside the Core i7-1360P despite having the same number of shaders. I am providing this slide to show that.
Considering the Radeon 780M runs at nearly double the Iris Xe’s 1.5 GHz clock rate, and AMD’s excellent graphics drivers, this isn’t particularly surprising. Of course, I haven’t gotten my hands on the Phoenix hardware yet, but I tested his RDNA 2-based Radeon 680M and was blown away by its ability at native 1080p. I also didn’t test the “Low” setting.
AMD declined to disclose details on how the Ryzen 7040U series handled gaming, so we dug this slide from the recent launch of the very similar Ryzen Z1 processor. It’s not a representation of how the Ryzen 5 7540U will perform, but given the very similar hardware under the hood, it’s probably not far off.
It’s interesting to note that in many of the titles tested, the Ryzen Z1 performed very close to the Z1 Extreme despite having only a third of the GPU compute and half the rasterization power on hand. is. Extreme parts are very likely facing memory bandwidth limitations and integrated graphics gaming is a scourge of his machine. Hopefully the vendor will quickly install his memory in machines with Phoenix APUs.
Speaking of which, I still expect to hear a lot of stories of such machines. AMD slightly delayed the announcement of these processors. We hope this will allow the company’s partners to prepare more products. With that said, you’ll probably get a press release in your inbox sooner or later, so if you want an ultraportable with a new Ryzen CPU, keep an eye out here.
