AMD first unveiled its new Ryzen lineup for laptops at CES 2023 last January. Now they exhibit more complete information from the processor.
The new Ryzen for this laptop is the Ryzen 7040U series, which uses Phoenix silicon made by TSMC with 4nm fabrication. But the most important thing is the innards, namely the combination of the CPU with the Zen 4 core and the RDNA 3 GPU.
For information, the Ryzen Z1 and Z1 Extreme chips for handheld consoles also use the same architectural combination.
The Ryzen 7040U is intended for ultraportable laptops, so its thermal design power (TDP) is in the 15-30W range. The number of CPU cores ranges from four cores of eight threads (Ryzen 3 7440U) to eight cores of 16 threads (Ryzen 7 7840U), we were quoted as saying from Techspot, Monday (8/5/2023).
Meanwhile, the clock speed ranges from 4.7 GHz to 5.1 GHz, slightly higher than the Ryzen Mobile 6000U, which has a maximum speed of 4.7 GHz. Then there are three versions of the GPU, Radeon 740M (4 RDNA 3 cores), Radeon 760M (eight RDNA 3 cores), and Radeon 780M (12 RDNA 3 cores).
The fastest GPU variant, the Radeon 780M has the potential to have quite capable gaming performance, which can play modern AAA games at 1080p resolution with sufficient frame rates.
Then what's interesting is that AMD also claims that the Ryzen 7840U has higher performance than the Apple M2, with a difference of up to 75% in various tests that are not disclosed in detail.
It's just that unfortunately AMD doesn't mention a comparison of performance with power consumption, which is actually the main strength of Apple Silicon, both M1 and M2 in various variants. That is a fairly fast performance but with very low power consumption.
This power consumption is considered important for chips used in portable devices such as laptops that use batteries as their power source. In addition, this lower power consumption means that the heat generated will also be lower. So the cooling system used can be smaller.
Oh yes, AMD also believes that the Ryzen 7040u line is better than the Intel Raptor Lake-P line of processors. To be precise, the performance of the Ryzen 7840U is claimed to be 128% higher than the Core i7-1360P when tested in various applications, including Passmark 10, Mozilla Kraken, Blender, Cinebench R23, Handbrake, and UL Procyon Office Productivity Benchmark.