Chipset

AMD Ryzen 7040U Series Mobile Processors Announced

AMD has announced the Ryzen 7040U line of mobile processors based on its Zen 4 architecture. This follows the launch of Ryzen 7035U Series at the CES earlier this year.

It comes in four variants, ranging from 8-core to 4-core processors, all of which have AMD’s RDNA 3 integrated graphics. These processors are intended for ultraportable laptops.

The Ryzen 7 7840U, Ryzen 5 7640U, Ryzen 5 7540U, and Ryzen 3 7440U processors feature AMD’s RDNA 3 Radeon 700M series integrated graphics.

AMD believes its new chip can compete with Apple’s M2 CPU in the 2022 MacBook Air and even outperform it in “application performance” by as much as 75%. These also include AMD’s Ryzen AI technology, an FPGA-based AI engine developed by Xilinx that AMD claims is the first of its kind and is designed to accelerate AI workloads.

The Ryzen 7 7840U is an 8-core, 16-thread processor with a base speed of 3.3 GHz and a turbo frequency of up to 5.1 GHz, while the Ryzen 5 7640U and Ryzen 5 7540U are 6-core components with L3 cache of 16 MB and L2 cache of 6 MB. The Ryzen 3 7440U APU has a base clock frequency of 3.0 GHz and a turbo frequency of up to 4.7 GHz.

All of the new mobile processors include AMD’s Radeon 700M graphics, with the Ryzen 5 7640U offering the Radeon 760M with 8 compute units (CU). The Radeon 740M with 4 CU is included in the entry-level Ryzen 3 7440U.

AMD has upped the graphics rates over the previous Ryzen Mobile 6000 series, with the Radeon 780M clocking up to 2.7 GHz, which is 300 MHz faster than the Radeon 680M, which hit up to 2.4 GHz.

Similar to its prior announcements, AMD has not mentioned the expected battery life of its 7040HS series. However, the efficiency of AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 7040U 15-30 W chips will become clear as partners and notebook vendors begin integrating Ryzen 7040U APUs with Zen 4 into their solutions.