AMD has announced its latest Ryzen 7040U series of mobile processors. The new chips bring AMD’s latest 4nm Zen 4 architecture and RDNA 3 integrated graphics to premium thin-and-light laptops. Check out all the details below.
AMD Ryzen 7040U: Powerful Mobile CPUs
AMD processors with the U suffix are ultra-low-power chips, offering the best power efficiency possible. The new Ryzen 7040U series CPUs are no different, with a rated TDP (thermal design power) of 15-30 watts. The Ryzen mobile processor naming scheme can be a little confusing, but you can learn all about it here. Moving on, the Ryzen 7040U series features 4 new SKUs:
Processor Cores/Threads Base Clock Turbo Clock iGPU iGPU Clock Cache (L3) Ryzen 7 7840U 8/16 3.3 GHz 5.1 GHz Radeon 780M (12 CUs) Up to 2.7 GHz 16 MB Ryzen 5 7640U 6/12 3.5 GHz 4.9 GHz Radeon 760M (8 CUs) Up to 2.6 GHz 16 MB Ryzen 5 7540U 6/12 3.2 GHz 4.9 GHz Radeon 740M (4 CUs) Up to 2.5 GHz 16 MB Ryzen 3 7440U 4/8 3.0 GHz 4.7 GHz Radeon 740M (4 CUs) Up to 2.5 GHz 8 MB
The top-end processors in the series — the Ryzen 7 7840U and the Ryzen 5 7640U — also get support for Ryzen AI, a dedicated FPGA-based AI engine developed by Xilinx for better performance in AI-related workloads. AMD claims it’s “the first dedicated artificial intelligence hardware in an x86 processor.”
AMD has positioned the 7040U series directly against Intel’s Core i7-1360P and Apple’s M2 chips. According to AMD’s benchmarks, the Ryzen 7 7840U outperforms its competitors in productivity, content creation, 3D rendering, and gaming workloads.
Compared to the Intel Core i7-1360P, AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U offers 29% better content creation performance, 37% better web performance, 39% better productivity performance, and 128% better media encoding performance.
Compared to the Apple M2, the Ryzen 7 7840U offers only a marginal increase in web browsing, image editing, and 3D rendering workloads. However, multi-core processing is significantly better on the AMD side.
The GPU gaming benchmarks also tell a similar story. The Radeon 780M iGPU outperforms the Iris Xe graphics on the Core i7-1360P at 1080p (low settings). However, we recommend taking these benchmarks with a grain of salt and waiting for independent reviews to see if the new chips live up to AMD’s claims.
The Ryzen 7 7840U and Ryzen 5 7540U from the lineup look similar to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme and Ryzen Z1 CPUs that AMD announced a week ago. However, the new chips offer more GPU cores, which would result in better performance. However, the performance uplift may only be marginal.
AMD hasn’t officially given a launch date for these CPUs. However, we can expect laptops with the Ryzen 7040U series to start hitting the shelves soon. We’ll update you as we get more information, so stay tuned.
