AMD Ryzen 7 8745H/HS “Zen 4” APU Launched: Hawk Point Minus The AI NPU

AMD has introduced its NPU-less Hawk Point offering, the Ryzen 7 8745H/HS, with Zen 4 CPU & RDNA 3 iGPU cores.

Earlier, it was reported that AMD was preparing a brand new Hawk Point APU that wouldn't feature any AI acceleration in the form of an NPU. The said APU is the Ryzen 7 8745H/HS which will pack a similar configuration as the Ryzen 7 8845HS but come with lower clock speeds on the CPU and the GPU.

Since the AMD Ryzen 7 8745H/HS APU will feature the same specs as the Ryzen 7 8845HS, it's easy to tell its specifications. 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 is clocked at a lower boost clock at 4.9 GHz while the 8845HS boosts up to 5.1 GHz. It will also feature the same Radeon 780M iGPU with 12 compute units based on the RDNA 3 architecture and a clock rate of 2600 MHz which is 100 MHz lower than the 8845HS. 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.

This APU should bring down the costs of Hawk Point laptops for more mainstream markets and it makes sense because not everyone wants an NPU-based AI acceleration. You can get that from a dedicated GPU too which should be faster. Lenovo already has its IdeaPad Pro 14 laptop listed at JD.com at 5499 RMB ($761 US) which features 24 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage. Expect the first laptops based on this new SKU to ship out later this month.

News Source: @realVictor_M