Well folks, they’re finally here: After a barrage of delays, AMD has unveiled its shiny new laptop processors, the Ryzen 7040U series. Engineered to power a new wave of next-gen ultrathin devices, these chips could take laptop performance to a whole new level – and AMD is clearly confident.
Why am I saying this? Well, Team Red doesn’t mess around with its promotional material: we have head-to-head comparisons not only with Intel’s competing 13th Gen CPUs, but also with Apple’s powerful M2 chip.
AMD doesn’t beat around the bush; The Ryzen 7 7840U, the first flagship APU in the new series, appears to offer 9% better 3D rendering performance, 14% better responsiveness, and a whopping 72% better multiprocessor performance than the standard M2. You can find that in the latest version MacBook Air – We can probably count on the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips to be found this year MacBook Pro.
With up to 8 Zen 4 cores and AMD’s integrated Radeon 780M graphics and XDNA AI architecture, these new chips – previously codenamed “Phoenix” – are purpose-built for the best ultrabooks around. With that in mind, they use impressively small amounts of electricity; Even the flagship 7840U consumes just 15W in base mode, almost half the base TDP of the competing Intel Core i7-1360P.
The RDNA 3 iGPUs are hugely improved here too, apparently outperforming the onboard Iris. That’s at 1080p low settings, but still impressive for a system without a dedicated GPU!
There will be four new chips: the aforementioned Ryzen 7 7840U, the mid-range Ryzen 5 7640U and 7540U, and the affordable Ryzen 3 7440U. There’s no Ryzen 9 chip yet – we don’t know if that’s not planned or if AMD is holding it in reserve for a later release.
The future of gaming laptops?
I’ve already noticed that AMD’s new chips could be a major blow to Nvidia and the discrete graphics market as a whole, and while I’m not blown away by the performance numbers shown here (percentage comparisons rather than actual framerates are meaningful), they are nonetheless impressive.
AMD is really committed to its integrated graphics cards, and I couldn’t be happier about that: I’ve believed in that for a long time Discrete graphics cards should be a thing of the pastand processors like this are a step in the right direction.
After all, AMD already makes the chips that power our modern consoles, and they do it from the Steam deck for the PS5. More recently, Team Red has been pushing its new Z1 series APUswhich will power the amazing new PC gaming handheld from Asus – the ROG ally.
Low-power processors and impressive integrated graphics could prove to be the future gaming laptops – If you’ve ever used a gaming laptop, you probably know that most of them are big, bulky, and heavy machines. That’s because they need to install a full graphics card; and not only that, but also a cooling solution and a large battery to back it up.
If you omit the dedicated GPU, you get great laptops like these Dell XPS 13: slim, light and without the jet engine fan whine of a beefy gaming rig. This is the future folks! I’m tired of lugging around my clunky old Razer Blade! I want something slim and light damn it! Let’s go AMD!
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