Phoenix To Fly Into Thin Notebooks

Back at CES 2023, AMD announced the first wave of Ryzen Mobile parts based on the Zen 4 architecture, the Ryzen Mobile 7040HS series. Based on AMD’s Phoenix silicon, which mixes Zen 4 CPU cores and AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics computing unit all on a single monolithic die using TSMC’s 4nm process node, Phoenix is ​​the next generation of high efficiency A highly integrated AMD silicon. And today AMD is revealing that Phoenix is ​​about to spread its wings a little bit more with the announcement of his Ryzen Mobile 7040U series for ultraportable notebooks.

The Ryzen Mobile 7040U series brings AMD’s latest generation technology to the thin and light laptop market, following AMD’s traditional cascading mobile launch strategy, increasingly as chip production increases and OEMs put together new designs. Provides new silicon for low-power devices. While the original 7040HS series was aimed at higher power, high performance laptops, the 7040U series uses the same silicon but is tuned for a more modest TDP ranging from 15 Watts to 30 Watts, making it ultraportable and thin Better suited for use on lightweight laptops – take full advantage of Zen 4’s efficiency.

The Ryzen Mobile 7040U series has been highly anticipated for quite some time. Back in the day at CES, AMD made it clear that his traditional U-series lineup was in development, but until now it was unclear when to expect it. Considering you can’t buy a 7040HS laptop today, today’s 7040U announcement from AMD shouldn’t be taken as a sign that 7040U laptops will hit retail shelves anytime soon.

AMD Ryzen 7040U Series: Up to 8 Cores with RDNA 3 Graphics

AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 7040 series spans multiple major mobile product categories, from entry-level, which AMD classifies as “everyday computing,” to its “ultimate gaming and creators” lineup for high-end, powerful gaming laptops. straddling. The new AMD Ryzen Mobile 7040U series at the bottom of AMD’s Pheonix Point series for mobile consists of 4 of his SKUs ranging from 8 cores to 4 cores. All of which include AMD’s RDNA 3 integrated graphics. Phoenix will also showcase AMD’s Ryzen AI technology, his FPGA-based AI engine developed by Xilinx. AMD claims to be the first AI processor of its kind and designed to accelerate AI workloads.

As announced at CES 2023, AMD has updated its mobile naming scheme to make it easier for users to decipher what every number and letter in their product name means. For the Ryzen Mobile 7040U series, the first digit represents the model year and 7 is used for 2023. The second digit represents the market segment (e.g. Ryzen 7 = 7, Ryzen 5 = 5/6, Ryzen 3 = 3). /4. The third digit (4) represents the CPU architecture of the product, so for the 7040 we are using the latest Zen 4 cores.

The last letter (suffix) is probably the most important indicator of the market segment. This is because it relates to TDP and form factor as U stands for 15-30W parts. For someone playing at home it’s a slight increase in the TDP window compared to the previous generation where the U series was 15-28W but because the laptop vendor can set his TDP wherever he likes , official his TDP is looser. Any recent guidelines.

Looking at the four Ryzen 7040U SKUs for thin and light AMD based notebooks, all four of the ‘Pheonix’ based APUs would include AMD’s RDNA 3 Radeon 700M series integrated graphics. The Ryzen 7 7840U starts off as a premier model, an 8C/16T part with a base frequency of 3.3 GHz and a turbo frequency of up to 5.1 GHz. There is 16 MB of L3 cache across the chip, 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and 8 MB of total L2 cache for a total of 24 MB of cache.

Moving down the stack are a pair of Ryzen 5 models, the Ryzen 5 7640U and Ryzen 7540U, both featuring 6 CPU cores. The Ryzen 5 7640U is the faster of the two chips, with a 300 MHz higher CPU base frequency than the 7540U (3.5 vs 3.2 GHz). However, both APUs have turbo frequencies up to 4.9 GHz. Interestingly, AMD also uses this point as a dividing line between parts that get the Ryzen AI coprocessor and parts that don’t. Included with the upper 7640U, but not with the lower 7540U. Beyond that, the Ryzen 5 7640U and Ryzen 5 7540U are 6-core parts, so they have 16 MB of L3 cache and 6 MB of L2 cache.

Since these are Ryzen 5 mobile Zen 4 APUs, they include AMD’s Radeon 700M graphics. The Ryzen 5 7640U has the better iGPU of the two, featuring a Radeon 760M with 8 CUs with a maximum frequency of 2.6 GHz. In comparison, the Ryzen 5 7540U has a lower spec of 4 CU’s while he’s powered by a Radeon 740M, but both iGPUs feature the same 16 ROP/2 RB+ blocks.

The entry-level option for AMD’s Zen 4 7040U series chips is the Ryzen 3 7440U. This is a quad-core APU (4C/8T) with a base frequency of his 3.0 GHz and a turbo frequency of up to 4.7 GHz. This part also includes Radeon 740M (4 CU) integrated graphics. Since this is a 4-core part, AMD has significantly reduced the amount of cache available. That’s a total of 12 MB, split between an 8 MB L3 cache and a 4 MB L2 cache.

AMD Radeon 780M Integrated Graphics Block Diagram

Radeon 760M (8 CU) and Radeon 740M (4 CU) have only 2 RB+ blocks, while Radeon 780M with 12 Compute Units (CU) has 4 Render Backends (RB+) in silicon Notice there is a block. Compared to the Ryzen Mobile 6000 series, AMD has also boosted the graphics frequencies, with the Radeon 780M clocked at up to 2.7 GHz, which is 300 MHz faster than the Radeon 680M’s up to 2.4 GHz.

AMD Ryzen 7040U with Ryzen AI: Includes 1 Xilinx XDNA Block

AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx, which was completed in February of last year, means that they were able to incorporate Xilinx’s expertise and architecture into their latest Zen 4 product. The most prominent example is what AMD calls his Ryzen AI, part of Xilinx’s XDNA architecture. This XDNA based architecture has been enabled in 2 of his 4 SKUs in the Ryzen 7040U series (the top 2 SKUs, Ryzen 7 7840U and Ryzen 5 7640U) and it’s in the Ryzen AI block integrated in the silicon. You can access it. The inclusion of “Ryzen AI” enhances the capabilities of AMD’s Phoenix processors in AI inference workloads, delivering task-specific silicon that is more efficient than CPUs and GPUs.

Another interesting highlight of AMD Ryzen AI is its direct support for Microsoft’s Studio Effects pack within Windows 11. AMD claims it can only be enabled by dedicated engines like AMD Ryzen AI. It’s an interesting inclusion into the silicon for AI workloads, but AMD didn’t provide or publish any expected performance numbers to accompany the announcement.

We usually take a stubborn stance when it comes to digesting our internal performance numbers but we’ve been optimizing things in our internal benchmarks with good results so we usually take these at face value is not. However, AMD did provide compute and gaming performance numbers comparing the Ryzen 7 7840U’s performance to Intel’s Core i7-1360P and compute performance to Apple’s M2 silicon.

AMD claims the Passmark 10 offers up to 175% performance improvement over Apple’s M2 chip and up to 228% media encoding performance over the Core i7-1360P. These are arguably best case numbers and should be taken with a pinch of salt. In 1360P side-by-side gaming performance numbers, it’s no surprise that the Radeon 780M performs 130% to 239% better. Certain title Intel. At the very least, AMD typically invests more in GPU silicon for their high-end mobile processors.

When it comes to battery life, AMD says it has invested heavily in efficiency leadership designed to extend battery life by implementing smart power management. As with previous announcements of the 7040HS series, AMD has yet to show battery life. We can see how efficient the Mobile 7040U 15-30 W chip is compared to the previous generation.

Ryzen 7040U launch: No date yet but expected soon

One of the most important topics regarding AMD’s Ryzen 7040 mobile series is when it will launch. According to early indications from AMD, we should be seeing widespread adoption of the 7040 chip in March. AMD announced in mid-March that he delayed the launch of the Ryzen Mobile 7040HS series until April.

As for the AMD Ryzen Mobile 7040U series, AMD has not announced any release date or expected launch date at this time. Given the timing of AMD’s announcement (a few weeks before Computex), we’re hoping to learn more about certain laptops in development and their expected release dates at the show.