The first full review of AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APUs has been published by Golden Pig Upgrade & it shows complete efficiency and gaming leadership.
AMD Phoenix Laptops Might Be Delayed But These Benchmarks Show Good Reason To Wait For Them, Outclass Intel In Both Efficiency Tests & Gaming
While AMD's Phoenix "Ryzen 7040" laptops have been hit with a small delay, moving their launch & availability from April to mid of May, there are still a lot of reasons to wait for them as showcased in performance reviews and tests by Bilibili's content creator, Golden Pig Upgrade.
The AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APU lineup utilizes both Zen 4 and RDNA 3 cores. The new Phoenix APUs carry LPDDR5x and PCIe 5 support and come in SKUs ranging from 35W to 45W. The APUs will be outfitted with the latest AMD XDNA AI engines based on Xilinx design known as Ryzen AI. It looks like AMD's RDNA 3 core architecture used in Phoenix APUs is internally referred to as RDNA 2.5 which means it is somewhat in between the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 designs. It also makes use of brand-new FP8 packages which are larger in size compared to the FP7/FP7rs SKUs as seen below:
The FP8 & FP7 Phoenix chips come in two packages, one with MIPI CSI support and one without. The FP7 SKUs will feature a Type3 PCB with a 10-layer design and support for up to LPDDR5/x-6400 memory & the FP8 SKUs will feature a Type4 PCB with HDI and support for up to LPDDR5x-7500 memory.
So coming to the tests, a total of four laptops were pitted against each other, all from Lenovo (14"). All designs are 2023 and two featured Intel 13th Gen Core i7-13700H & Core i5-13500H while the other two featured the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 7 7735HS CPUs.
The AMD laptops were configured with 55W while the Intel laptops were configured at 65W. The Intel laptops were using LPDDR5-5200 memory while the AMD laptops were using LPDDR5x-6400 memory.
First up, we have the synthetic benchmarks in Cinebench R23 where Intel retains a small lead in the single-core benchmarks but AMD ends up faster in multi-threaded benchmarks. Same is the case in 7-Zip where the single-core performance is around 85-95% of the Intel CPUs but multi-core exceeds them. The Ryzen 7735HS sits 21% ahead of the Core i5-13500H and the 7840HS sits around 10% ahead of the Core i7-13700H.
In Video encoding performance, the AMD VCN 4.0 engine excels with 44% better performance than VCN 3.0 and a 53% increase over NVIDIA's 7th Gen NVENC in H.264. In H.265, VCN 4.0 leads both VCN 3.0 and NVENC by 30% and 42%, respectively. It looks like the current version of OBS doesn't fully support AV1 encoding on Phoenix APUs but that will be fixed once official support is released at launch.
AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APU Synthetic & Video Encoding Benchmarks (Image Credits: Golden Pig Upgrade):
In gaming, all chips were first tested with the discrete GPU which is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 at the same TGP across all laptops. The AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS delivered performance on par with Intel Core i7-13700H with LPDDR5-5600 memory and it is also shown that the use of LPDDR5x-7500 ram can increase performance substantially. LPDDR5x-7500 delivers a 3.26% boost over LPDDR5x-6400 and a 16% boost over LPDDR5x-5500 memory.
Following are the 1080p gaming results in various titles using the High quality preset. The Ryzen 7 7745HX seems to feature slightly better performance but that could be due to AMD Dragon Range offering higher cache than the rest of the two mobile chips.
AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APU Memory Scaling Benchmarks (Image Credits: Golden Pig Upgrade):
AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APU RTX 4060 Gaming Benchmarks (Image Credits: Golden Pig Upgrade):
Another interesting thing is the AIDA64 GPGPU Benchmark which shows that the Radeon 780M iGPU outputs 4.2 TFLOPs of FP32 compute whereas AMD shows it as 8.9 TFLOPs. This means it should be comparable to Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake Xe-LPG GPU in actual games. That said, RDNA 3 iGPUs are very capable as demonstrated here.
Talking about iGPU benchmarks, the AMD Radeon 780M RDNA 3 chip integrated into the Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APUs is anywhere from 70% to 2x faster than Intel's integrated solution with 96 EUs, their fastest integrated chip on the market yet. That's absolutely amazing performance and almost gets close to GTX 1060 desktop-class performance.
You can definitely expect over 60 FPS in a majority of AAA games at 1080P using a mix of high and medium settings. There's also the advantage of FSR and RSR support which these new chips can utilize for even higher performance.
AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APU Radeon 780M RDNA 3 iGPU Gaming Benchmarks (Image Credits: Golden Pig Upgrade):
Now coming to the most important part which is power, the AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APUs absolutely crush the competition here. The Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 7 7735HS sit ahead of the competition while consuming much lower wattage in multi-threaded workloads. Even the RDNA iGPU is faster than the RTX 3050 6 GB when both are running at the same TDP of 45W which is impressive. In all power metrics, the AMD Phoenix APUs had the absolute lead over Intel's parts.
For example, in Cinebench R23, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS delivers 8.5% higher performance than the Intel CPU when both are running at 45W TDP and 5% better performance when both run at 55W TDP. At its maximum 65W TDP, the Intel chip only comes on par with the Ryzen APU. The same is the case with the Ryzen 7 7735HS which delivers the same performance as the Core i5-13500H at the same TDP.
As for video playback, the AMD Ryzen CPUs consume close as low as 3.14W power which is much lower than the 5.23W consumed by the Core i5-13500H as seen below:
AMD Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APU Power Tests (Image Credits: Golden Pig Upgrade):
There is vast majority of users who have been waiting to get hands-on AMD Phoenix APU-powered laptops for a while now. Not only do these laptops offer amazing performance and efficiency but it also provides one of the best-integrated graphics solutions which can be a game-changer for users who are looking to buy a budget gaming laptop. We have heard that most of these laptops will be targeting the $1000 US price point and some variants will even sell for below that which is great. As for handhelds, we have seen options ranging from $599 US all the way up to $999 US. You can also check out various performance benchmarks of the RDNA 3 iGPU here to get a taste of what you get when buying a Phoenix laptop.
Expect a huge wave of AMD Ryzen Phoenix laptops available this month with eye-catching prices close to $1000 US and far more affordable than Intel's solutions.
AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" & Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" Laptop APUs:
| CPU Name | Family | Process Node | Cores / Threads | Base / Boost Clock | L3 Cache | iGPU | iGPU Clock | TDP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 8945HS (PRO) | Hawk Point-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 8/16 | 4.0 / 5.2 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 780M (RDNA 3 12 CU) | 2800 MHz | 35-54W |
| Ryzen 7 8845HS (PRO) | Hawk Point-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 8/16 | TBD / 5.1 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 780M (RDNA 3 12 CU) | 2700 MHz | 35-54W |
| Ryzen 7 8840HS (PRO) | Hawk Point-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 8/16 | 3.8 / 5.1 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 780M (RDNA 3 12 CU) | 2700 MHz | 20-30W |
| Ryzen 5 8645HS (PRO) | Hawk Point-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 6/12 | 4.3 / 5.0 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 760M (RDNA 3 8 CU) | 2700 MHz | 35-54W |
| Ryzen 5 8640HS (PRO) | Hawk Point-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 6/12 | TBD / 4.9 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 760M (RDNA 3 8 CU) | 2600 MHz | 20-30W |
| Ryzen 7 8840U (PRO) | Hawk Point-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 8/16 | 3.3 / 5.1 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 760M (RDNA 3 8 CU) | 2600 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 5 8640U (PRO) | Hawk Point-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 6/12 | 3.5 / 4.9 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 760M (RDNA 3 8 CU) | 2600 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 5 8540U (PRO) | Hawk Point-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 6/12 | 3.2 / 4.9 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 740M (RDNA 3 4 CU) | 2500 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 3 8440U | Hawk Point-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 4/8 | 3.0 / 4.7 GHz | 8 MB | Radeon 740M (RDNA 3 4 CU) | 2500 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 9 7940HS | Phoenix-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 8/16 | 4.0 / 5.2 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 780M (RDNA 3 12 CU) | 2800 MHz | 35-54W |
| Ryzen 7 7840HS | Phoenix-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 8/16 | 3.8 / 5.1 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 780M (RDNA 3 12 CU) | 2700 MHz | 35-54W |
| Ryzen 5 7640HS | Phoenix-H | 4nm Zen 4 | 6/12 | 4.3 / 5.0 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 760M (RDNA 3 8 CU) | 2600 MHz | 35-54W |
| Ryzen 7 7840U | Phoenix-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 8/16 | 3.3 / 5.1 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 780M (RDNA 3 12 CU) | 2700 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 5 7640U | Phoenix-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 6/12 | 3.5 / 4.9 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 760M (RDNA 3 8 CU) | 2600 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 5 7545U | Phoenix-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 6/12 | 3.2 / 4.9 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 740M (RDNA 3 4 CU) | 2600 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 5 7540U | Phoenix-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 6 / 12 | 3.2 / 4.9 GHz | 16 MB | Radeon 740M (RDNA 3 4 CU) | 2600 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 3 7440U | Phoenix-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 4 / 8 | 3.0 / 4.7 GHz | 8 MB | Radeon 740M (RDNA 3 4 CU) | 2500 MHz | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 3 7440U | Phoenix-U | 4nm Zen 4 | 4 / 8 | 3.0 / 4.7 GHz | 8 MB | Radeon 740M (RDNA 3 4 CU) | 2500 MHz | 15-30W |
