AMD Says New Ryzen 7040 Chips Outperform Intel (and Apple) in Thin-and-Light PCs – Ars Technica

AMD today announced additional details about its new Ryzen 7040U series of laptop chips, which bring the latest Zen 4 CPU architecture and integrated RDNA 3 graphics into thin and light laptops. Although just part of AMD’s (often confusing) Ryzen 7000 laptop lineup, the 7040U processors are going to be the best if you want to maximize performance without the need for a larger CPU-packed laptop. custom graphics.

AMD has delayed announcing these chips twice. AMD announced in mid-March that the systems would begin shipping in April, which is currently the beginning of May. One of the laptop makers offering a Ryzen 7040-series laptop, the Framework, won’t actually ship pre-orders of its own until sometime in the third quarter, though the big PC companies should presumably be able to market things in A little sooner.

For most applications and games, the thing most relevant to the Ryzen 7040 chipset is the improved CPU and GPU performance. The advanced Ryzen 7 7840U combines 8 CPU cores running at speeds up to 5.1GHz and a Radeon 780M GPU with 12 RDNA 3 cores. The Ryzen 5 7640U has 6 CPU cores running at up to 4.9GHz and a Radeon 760M GPU with 8 cores. The Ryzen 5 7540U has the same 6 CPU cores but with a lower end Radeon 740M GPU with 4 cores, while the Ryzen 3 7440U combines the same Radeon 740M GPU with 4 CPU cores.

All four CPUs have a TDP between 15 and 30 watts. Manufacturers can decide what type of TDP they want to use based on how fast they want their computers to be and how much heat the fans and heatsinks can dissipate.

The 7840U and 7540U look a lot like the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and Z1 processors AMD announced for gaming laptops last week, and from that announcement, we know that increasing the number of GPUs from 4 to 12 cores doesn’t have to be doubled or doubled. your performance. Memory bandwidth is still a major limitation for integrated GPUs, so the low-end Radeon 740M should be a step up from the three-generation Intel Iris Xe GPU that Intel still uses for its ultrabook processors.

In terms of performance, AMD says the 7840U can beat both the Core i7-1360P and Apple M2 in a few broad performance categories. Curiously, the company didn’t compare the 7840U to the Core i7-1370P, which is Intel’s fastest CPU in this product class and has two more cores compared to the i7-1360P. Ryzen performance should remain competitive but take AMD performance comparisons with a grain of salt.

The 7840U and 7640U also include a new feature called “Ryzen AI,” which, as the name suggests, is hardware dedicated to accelerating AI and machine learning workloads (Apple’s “neural engine” plays a similar role in the M1 and M2 chips). Ryzen AI is powered by AMD’s XDNA architecture, a product of AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx. AMD says Ryzen AI is “the first dedicated AI hardware in an x86 processor.” Intel’s next-gen chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, are also said to include AI acceleration, but they won’t be around until later this year at the earliest.

Ryzen AI should improve the performance of things like AI-powered language models, image generation, and audio transcription when these workloads are run locally rather than relying on a server. Windows 11 has a handful of built-in AI-accelerated features, including Studio Effects for webcams that can replace your background and apply other effects. Right now, these are mostly exclusive to arm-based Windows devices like the Surface Pro 9 with LTE or Windows Dev Kit 2023, since their Qualcomm Snapdragon-based processors include “Neural Processing Units” (NPUs) that most current x86 processors don’t have.

Windows and other operating systems should start adding more AI-powered features as more computers get the hardware to take advantage of them.

Listing image by AMD