AMD Preps Ryzen 7 8745HS APU, Same Specs As Ryzen 7 8845HS Minus The Hawk Point NPU

AMD is preparing a new Hawk Point APU under the Ryzen 8040 family, the Ryzen 7 8745HS, which will reportedly feature no AI NPU.

The information comes from reputable leaker and insider, Golden Pig Upgrade at Weibo, who says that AMD is preparing a new Ryzen 8040 APU that won't feature any NPU hardware. The new APU will feature the same specs as one of the SKUs that's already been released, the Ryzen 7 8845HS, & will target the mobility platforms with better value.

Since the AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS APU will feature the same specs as the Ryzen 7 8845HS, it's easy to tell what its specifications would end up being. We are looking at 8 cores based on the Zen 4 core architecture with 16 threads, 16 MB L3 cache, and 8 MB L2 cache. The chip will be clocked at a 3.8 GHz base and 5.1 GHz boost frequency. It will also feature the same Radeon 780M iGPU with 12 compute units based on the RDNA 3 architecture and a clock rate of 2700 MHz. The Ryzen 8040HS lineup scales from 35W up to 45W and has default TDPs set at 45W.

The AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS "Hawk Point" APU features an integrated NPU with 16 TOPS and offers up to 38 platform TOPS. Since the Ryzen 7 8745HS won't feature the same AI NPU, its total TOPS will be 25 (GPU+CPU). These will be even lower TOPS than Intel's Meteor Lake "Core Ultra" CPUs which max out at a total of 34 platform TOPS. Now it makes sense to offer Ryzen SKUs without the integrated NPUs since not all users want to have dedicated NPU capabilities. These chips will be integrated within laptops that already feature a dedicated discrete graphics chip which will offer higher TOPS than the combined TOPS of the APU itself.

The exclusion of NPU can lead to better value on a range of laptop offerings so we look forward to what OEMs will have on offer. AMD's Strix Point APUs are also coming out later this month which will extend the AI leadership with 50 TOPS from the NPU alone and up to 80 combined TOPS. Meanwhile, Lunar Lake CPUs from Intel will offer over 100 TOPS with 48 TOPS from the NPU and some strong AI capabilities from the Xe2 GPUs.