AMD introduces Ryzen 8040 series for notebooks

AMD has unveiled new mobile processors that will be delivered to notebook manufacturers with immediate effect. The company wants to ensure that the Ryzen 8040 chips reach customers in the first quarter of 2024. The Ryzen 8040 processors are almost identical to the previous generation (7040), but have been updated for AI applications. It is therefore a new edition of the Zen 4 (CPU), RDNA-3 (iGPU) and XDNA (NPU) architectures.

The new NPU is called "Ryzen AI" by AMD - it has become significantly faster than the previous version. This makes sense in times of increasing generative artificial intelligence and with regard to Windows 12. The performance of the 8040 CPUs has increased from 10 to 16 TOPS. In practice, this should lead to a performance increase of 40 per cent in the Llama 2 and Vision models, for example.

In addition to the accelerated neural processing unit, AMD is also ensuring that the CPU and iGPU are also equipped for AI. The Zen 4 CPU cores support important AI instruction sets (AVX-512 VNNI) and the "RDNA 3" iGPU has two AI accelerators per compute unit. The overall performance of the new system-on-a-chip is said to be 39 TOPS - compared to 33 TOPS for its predecessor.

As can be seen, the new 8040 series initially comprises nine mobile processors. These are manufactured in a 4-nanometre process at TSMC. The four fastest Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 models have 8 cores and 16 threads and clock at up to 5.1 and 5.2 gigahertz respectively (top model Ryzen 9 8945HS). Their CPU cores each have one megabyte of L2 cache at their disposal - together they also have access to 16 megabytes of L3 cache.

The iGPUs are all taken from the 7040 series without any adjustments, including the model number. The most powerful Radeon 780M has 12 compute units, 768 shaders, 24 AI accelerators, 12 ray accelerators and clock speeds of up to 2.8 gigahertz. The new NPU is available for seven models. The power consumption of the new processors is 15-30 watts for the U series for thin notebooks, 20-30 watts for 0HS and 35-54 watts for the remaining HS series processors.

As there are no AI applications with Ryzen AI support yet, AMD offers developers a programming tool - the Ryzen AI Software 1.0. Whether and how quickly the new NPU will make sense therefore depends heavily on how much AI applications are pushed in the coming year. If you can wait another year, you should stay away from notebooks with Hawk Point processors for the time being, as the new Zen 5 architecture will be introduced later in 2024 with Strix Point.