AMD Ryzen 7040U series processors, the first Ryzen chips with XDNA.

Only the Ryzen 7 7840U and Ryzen 5 7640U will get Ryzen AI via XDNA. AMD hasn’t revealed much information yet about what exactly it will do, though their slides talk about “magical new experiences” and indicate that the capabilities can evolve and improve over time. The only concrete statement is that there will be a Studio Effects Pack in Windows 11 that can only be used on a dedicated AI engine like this, but that feature is not yet supported.According to AMD’s own benchmarks, the 7840U offers up to a 29% improvement in content creation performance, a 37% improvement in web applications, a 39% improvement in productivity, an 89% improvement in Passmark, and a 128% improvement in media encoding compared to the Intel Core i7-1360P.

According to AMD’s fine print, the Ryzen 7 7840U was tested on an AMD reference board with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, while the Intel device was an MSI Summit Flip 14 with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Testing included PCMark 10, Passmakr, Kraken, Procyon Microsoft productivity tests, PCMark 10 Digital Content Creation, Handbrake, Blender and LAME MP3. AMD says the Ryzen 7 7840U is 5% faster at web browsing, 8% faster at image processing, 9% faster at 3D rendering, 14% more responsive, 72% better at multiprocessing, and 75% better at Passmark 10 compared to the Apple M2.

AMD tested a MacBook Pro 13-inch with an M2 processor cooled by a fan and equipped with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD for performance. Various benchmarks such as Passmark 10, Kraken, Puget and Blender were used to determine these numbers. It is unclear to what extent the neural engine developed by Apple is included in the M2 processors. In addition to the new Ryzen 7 and 9 chips with up to 12 cores and a clock speed of up to 2.7 GHz, there are now also three new integrated graphics options: Radeon 780M, 760M and 740M. These new Radeons use RDNA 3 and feature an improved media engine for AV1 and ML with enhanced encoding and increased AI throughput. Peak performance of the company’s integrated GPUs is up to 8.6 TFLOPS (FP16).

AMD has benchmarked the performance of the Radeon 780M against the Core i7-1360P’s Iris Xe graphics and reported that the Ryzen 7 7840U with the new graphics achieved 30% better performance on DOTA 2 at low quality presets, 40% better performance on CS:GO, 63% better performance on Far Cry 6, and a whopping 139% better performance on Cyberpunk 2077. It’s important to note, however, that this is a benchmark run by AMD on an MSI Summit Flip 14 laptop with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. As with all manufacturer benchmarks, it is recommended to run independent tests to evaluate the actual performance of the CPU and integrated graphics.

Although AMD promises long battery life and claims that the 7040U chips will offer “intelligent power management that ensures the longest possible time without power,” the company has not revealed many concrete details. So we’ll have to wait and see how this performs in our tests. The Phoenix processors were announced at CES and the HS-series chips were originally scheduled to launch in March, but were delayed until April. AMD says they are now shipping to OEMs and should be available at retail in the next few weeks.

The company has not yet revealed any information about which 7040U series models will be supported or when they will be available. However, the announcement suggests that the laptops could be available soon, possibly at Computex in Taiwan later this month. This development could also give us more insight into the HS-series Phoenix chips.

Source: AMD