AMD Ryzen 7040U “Phoenix” APUs Detailed: Ryzen 7 7840U, Ryzen 5 7640U, Ryzen 5 7540U, Ryzen 3 7440U

AMD has lifted the curtains off of its Ryzen 7040U "Phoenix" APUs for low-power laptops which feature Zen 4 CPU & RDNA 3 GPU cores.

While AMD's Phoenix Ryzen 7040 family has been announced since CES 2023, the red team has only given us the juicy bits for its higher-end H and HS SKUs. Today, AMD is offering details on its Ryzen 7040U APUs which will target low-power laptops in the 15-30W TDP range. The lineup will include a total of four SKUs.

Starting with the flagship, we have the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U which features 8 cores and 16 threads based on the Zen 4 core architecture, a clock speed of up to 5.1 GHz, 16 MB of L3 cache, and 8 MB of L2 cache. The chip features the Radeon 780M iGPU with 12 RDNA 3 compute units and a clock speed of up to 2700 MHz. This chip is also offered in the Ryzen Z1 Extreme variation for handheld consoles with some added power tuning and optimizations.

The Ryzen 5 lineup for the 7040U series is made up of two SKUs. The Ryzen 5 7640U and the Ryzen 5 7540U. Both APUs feature 6 cores, 12 threads, boost clocks of up to 4.9 GHz, a Radeon 760M GPU with 8 RDNA 3 Compute Units clocked at 2600 MHz, and support for LPDDR5x-7500 memory. There is just one difference between the two chips and that's the Socket compatibility. The 7640U comes in FP7, FP7r2, and FP8 variants while there's no FP8 variant for the 7540U. The FP8 design allows a faster memory design and more layers to be incorporated within high-end laptop designs.

Lastly, we have the AMD Ryzen 3 7440U which is a 4-core and 8-thread part based on the Zen 4-core architecture with clock speeds of up to 4.7 GHz. This chip also has no FP8 variation and gets just 8 MB of L3 and 4 MB of L2 cache alongside its Radeon 740M iGPU which offers 4 RDNA 3 CUs running at 2500 MHz. This is the same chip design used for the Ryzen Z1.

In terms of performance, AMD compared the Ryzen 7 7840U against the Intel Core i7-1360P and Apple M2. The chip offered up to a 228% increase over Intel's and a 175% increase over the Apple chip across various application workloads. In graphics performance, the RDNA 3 iGPU outclassed the Intel Iris Xe solution with a lead of up to 239% at 1080P. We have already seen some awesome performance benchmarks here.

Considering that AMD has recently said about OEMs shipping their first systems based on Phoenix APUs now, we can expect the first laptops featuring the Ryzen 7040U APUs within a few weeks.