It wasn’t that long ago that the concept of a high-end laptop powered by an AMD CPU was a laughable proposition. Now, the company is in direct competition with Intel’s best, at least at the high end. For laptops with lower power constraints than what the AMD Ryzen 7045 series can serve, AMD today announced the monolithic Ryzen 7040U series.
That’s right: these processors will be the second wave of Phoenix-based chips to hit the market. The Ryzen 7040 series launched at CES this year is a series once known as “APU”: these SoCs were launched to balance CPU and GPU performance, as opposed to the mainly CPU-oriented Ryzen 7045HX series, codenamed “Longling”. “
Specifically, the models introduced today carry a “U” suffix, indicating that they are generally configured with lower power limits than the thirstier 7040HS processors announced at CES.By the way, these are already available; you can buy one right now, like this ASUS ROG 14-inch model with Ryzen 9 7940HS and 165 Hz display at Best Buy. Lenovo’s Legion Slim 7 should also be available any time soon.
Just like the “HS” processors, on the 7040U series you get 4 to 8 Zen 4 CPU cores clocked up to 5.1 GHz, up to 6 RDNA 3 workgroup processors (12 CUs), and an AMD XDNA AI accelerators, all packaged in TDPs as low as 15W, at least for these first “-U” models. In fact, while AMD hasn’t revealed much, it’s almost certainly the exact same chip used in the Ryzen Z1 chip aimed specifically at handheld PCs.
So before we get into 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 you to peruse, located next to the existing “HS” parts in the image below:
Compared to the Ryzen 7040HS processors, the base clock frequencies of these -U models have dropped quite a bit: from 3.8 GHz in the Ryzen 7 7840HS to 3.3 GHz in the Ryzen 7 7840U, and from 4.3 GHz in the Ryzen 5 7640HS to 3.5 in the Ryzen 5 7640U on GHz. This will have an impact on their multi-core performance, but there will be little change in boost clocks, meaning the day-to-day use experience should be very similar.
There are bigger differences, though. -U-series processors also reduce L3 cache by half or more, from 32MB to just 16MB on most models and just 8MB on the Ryzen 3 7440U. Additionally, the lower-end 7040U chips are starting to lose most of their GPU horsepower. In addition to the obvious drop in compute units, all processors except the Ryzen 7 7840U also lose half of their rendering backend.
Finally, only half of the 7040U series retains the XDNA-based Ryzen AI coprocessor. Of course, the “X” in XDNA stands for Xilinx, and while it’s not entirely clear what the on-chip AI processor actually does, AMD is referring to Windows 11’s Studio Effects Pack — a set of filters and effects you can apply to video conference calls – Can be accelerated with Ryzen AI to save CPU or GPU time.
Of course, the biggest change is the drop in TDP: Ryzen 7040HS models are rated from 35 to 54 watts, but the -U series starts at 15 watts and caps out at just 30 watts. We’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that “-U” as a name is usually reserved for processors near the bottom of the range, but AMD itself has tacitly acknowledged this by comparing these CPUs to 25-watt Intel CPUs (Core i7) One point-1360P.
In that race, AMD claimed to be 29% to 128% faster than Intel CPUs. Here’s what it looks like when comparing the top-tier Ryzen 7 7840U to an Intel chip. But what about Apple’s energy-efficiency geniuses? How does it compare to ARM competitors?
Quite favorable, at least according to AMD’s own data. In the company’s tests using Cinebnech R23, Passmark 10, Mozilla Kraken, PugetBench and Blender, its new chip consistently outperformed last year’s Apple chip, especially in Cinebench and Passmark. Although AMD did not disclose the TDP configuration used in the test, the performance was not bad. Apple’s part has a 20W TDP.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an AMD launch without some mention of gaming performance. AMD’s APUs have always delivered impressive graphics performance, at least as far as integrated graphics is concerned. The company didn’t provide any hard numbers on gaming performance, but it did provide this slide showing that the Radeon 780M delivers a blast to the Iris Xe graphics card inside the Core i7-1360P, even though they have the same number of shaders.
That’s not surprising considering the Radeon 780M runs at nearly twice the Iris Xe’s 1.5 GHz clock speed, and has AMD’s superior graphics drivers. Obviously, we haven’t gotten our hands on any Phoenix hardware yet, but we’ve tested the RDNA 2-based Radeon 680M and were surprised by its capabilities at native 1080p, and we didn’t test the “low” setting either. RDNA 3’s update to this section sounds like it should be a winner.
Since AMD refuses to reveal any hard details about how the Ryzen 7040U series handles gaming, we dug out this slideshow from the recently launched and extremely similar Ryzen Z1 processors. These numbers certainly don’t represent the performance of the Ryzen 7 7840U or Ryzen 5 7540U, but considering the extremely similar hardware inside, they’re probably not far off.
Interestingly, the Ryzen Z1’s performance was not far behind that of the Z1 Extreme in many of the games tested, even though its GPU had only one-third the computing power and half the rasterization power of the Z1 Extreme. The Extreme part will most likely run into memory bandwidth limitations – the bane of integrated graphics gaming machines. Hopefully vendors will equip any machine with a Phoenix APU with fast memory.
Speaking of which, we expect to hear about a lot of these machines every day by now. AMD has delayed the launch of these processors slightly, which we expect is to allow the company’s partners to have more products ready. That said, we’re probably going to get a press release in our inbox sooner or later, so if you’re itching to get your hands on an ultraportable laptop with a new Ryzen CPU, keep your eyes peeled here.