AMD has announced the specs of its 7040U "Phoenix" series processors, including some of its first with its XDNA-powered AI engine. There's still no word on the 7040HS processor specs, though the company did tell us yesterday that the HS chips are now shipping to OEMs and are slated to arrive at retail in the coming weeks.
The lineup is headlined by the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U, paired with Radeon 780M graphics and Ryzen AI using the XDNA architecture. AMD suggests it's stronger than both competing Intel PCs and Macs.
Only the Ryzen 7 7840U and Ryzen 5 7640U will get Ryzen AI through XDNA. AMD isn't saying a ton about what it will do, though its slides claim "magical new experiences" and that the capabilities can "advance and improve over time." The only real claim it's making is that there will be a Studio Effects Pack in Windows 11 that can be used only on a dedicated AI engine such as this one, but that those are not yet supported.
In its own benchmarks, AMD compared the 7840U to Intel's Core i7-1360P, claiming it offers up to 29% better content creation performance, 37% improvement in web applications, 39% in productivity, 89% on Passmark, and 128% improvement in media encoding.
According to AMD's small print, the 7840U was on an AMD reference board with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, while the Intel machine was an MSI Summit Flip 14 with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Tests included PCMark 10, Passmakr, Kraken, Procyon Microsoft productivity tests, PCMark 10 Digital Content Creation, Handbrake, Blender, and LAME MP3.
Compared to Apple's M2, AMD claims the Ryzen 7 7840U is 5% better at web browsing, 8% better at image editing, 9% better at 3D rendering, 14% more responsive, 72% better at multiprocessing and 75% better on Passmark 10.
Looking at the legalese, AMD tested against a MacBook Pro 13-inch (meaning the M2 as under a fan) with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD. Tests to get those numbers include Passmark 10, Kraken, Puget, and Blender benchmarks. It's not clear how much of this includes Apple's own neural engine in its M2 processors.
