It’s no secret that AMD has a new low-power laptop chip with powerful integrated graphics. Companies like Asus, Aokzoe, and Ayaneo are sticking it — or the Z1 Extreme spinoff — into their gaming laptops. But the AMD 7840U was originally designed for thin, powerful laptops, and the company is finally starting to share that story today.
AMD claims the new chip could give Apple a run for its money, beating the M2 2022 MacBook Air processor in “application performance” by up to 75 percent and trailing the Intel Core i7-1360P processor by more than that in both throughput. And The graphics, as you’ll see are somewhat vaguely outlined in the diagrams below.
Overall, AMD customer PR manager Matthew Horowitz told me the chip offers up to a 24 percent increase in “application performance” over the company’s 6850H chip.
AMD claims it can do all of that while offering “leading efficiency for exceptional battery life,” but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer even the vaguest idea of what battery life might be like. The company probably doesn’t know yet: All of these benchmarks were run on a reference board rather than a laptop. (Apple’s M2-powered laptops dominate in battery life, so it’s kind of important to know!)
However, Hurwitz said we can expect more information about battery life and FPS for games, and AMD wasn’t far behind in the Windows realm. He says Framework (which recently announced its first AMD-powered laptop), Razer, Acer, HP, and Lenovo will use these chips, among others.
The AMD 7840U isn’t alone in the new lineup of 15- to 30-watt U-series parts. There will be Ryzen 9, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 3 series parts as well, which will feature three different graphics tiers as well: a 12-core Radeon 780M, eight Radeon 760M cores, and four Radeon 740M cores.