AMD is introducing four new Ryzen 7000 series laptop processors. All four are based on Zen 4. The chips differ from older members of the family by their low TDP, which makes them suitable for design mobile devices.

AMD unpacks with Ryzen 7040U. This is the collective term for four new “U” processors in the Ryzen 7000 Mobile series. AMD released Ryzen 7000 for laptops earlier this year, but only brought a relatively limited lineup to the world. Specifically, the manufacturer focused on relatively powerful “HX” and “HS” chips with a TDP of 35 watts or more. These processors are ideal for slightly more powerful and rugged laptops, but not for the thinnest and most portable devices on the market. With the Ryzen 7040U, AMD now provides components specifically for this market segment.

Four CPUs

AMD is launching four new processors, divided into Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen Three. As four suggests in the name, all new chips will be built using the manufacturer’s latest Zen 4 architecture. The TDP is configurable for each component between 15 watts and 30 watts. This makes the CPUs suitable for the thinnest and most portable devices manufacturers are releasing today, although AMD is yet to communicate about laptops that actually contain the chips. The following components are new:

GPU and accelerator

All chips are paired with a graphics component based on the RDNA-3 architecture. Radeon 780M GPU will be paired with Ryzen 7 chip, Radeon 760M is slightly less powerful and will come to Ryzen 5, Radeon 740M is reserved for Ryzen 3 and certain Ryzen 5 chips.

AMD also packs another XDNA chiplet onto the CPUs. It must support Ryzen AI. Ryzen AI with XDNA is an embedded AI accelerator whose value is not yet fully understood. In any case, according to AMD, its own chips are a lot more powerful and efficient than what the competition has on the market today. We also point out that Intel already has modern U-chips with 15 watts TDP on the shelves and AMD therefore has to catch up a modest deficit. AMD even claims that the new 7040U CPUs are more powerful than the Apple M2 chips.

Faster than Intel

AMD claims that the Ryzen 7040 chips will add significant value to many productivity tasks. The manufacturer pits an Intel Core i7-1360P against its own Ryzen 7 7840U and notes through unconfirmed benchmarks that the Ryzen chip is 29 percent more powerful on content creation-related workloads, up to more than 100 percent for media encoding . The chip would also have an advantage for productivity, as the Passmark benchmark shows.