AMD has officially unveiled the new Ryzen 7840U, bringing forth yet another super-powered laptop chip. The company claims that it can beat Apple’s current mobile offering, the M2.
The latest laptop chips from AMD are coming out swinging, as is the company itself. With the official announcement of the Ryzen 7840U, AMD is coming for Apple’s crown as the best laptop APU on the market.
Apple has long since been considered the king of efficiency when it comes to laptop silicon, especially when they first debuted the M1 chip in late 2020. Consequently, chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD have been playing catch-up ever since. But, AMD claims that they have finally come for the Cupertino crown.
Onboard the Ryzen 7840U is also Radeon 780M, providing the graphical power needed for content creation and gaming applications. It’s also believed that the Ryzen Z1 is based on the 7840U, and is being used in the upcoming Asus ROG Ally.
AMD Ryzen 7840U benchmarks vs Apple & Intel
In AMD’s released benchmarks comparing the two, it claims that on the multiprocessing front, the 7840U can best the regular M2 by up to 75%.
Team Red has also made no mention of battery life, something that has become a bit of a concern for high-powered laptops. Even the mighty M1 and M2 Apple laptops have a limited battery once you begin to push the chipset with heavy workloads.
AMD also compared it to the Intel laptop chip, the 1360-P, besting it by 128% in terms of media encoding – something vitally important for video editors.
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The new Ryzen 7840U has been designated the “U”, as it’ll be found in more “professional” laptops going forward. This is quite different from the “HX” previously announced, as it’ll be less focused on pure performance, and more on overall reliability.
AMD’s confusing naming scheme doesn’t stop there, as the 7040U line comes in four different flavors. On the top is the aforementioned 7840U, which is classed as Ryzen 7. Next, Ryzen 5 class will be filled by two models, the 7640U and 7540U. At the very base level, Ryzen 3, 7440U will be provided on low-end laptops.
The Ryzen 5 and 3 chips will be using Radeon 760M and 740M GPUs, too. This could eventually worm its way into future handheld gaming PC devices such as the ones made by Ayaneo.
AMD 7040U laptop chip specs
| CPU | Cores | Threads | GHz (Base) | GHz (Boost – Up To) | Cache | TDP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 7 7840U | 8 | 16 | 3.3 | 5.1 | 24MB | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 5 7640U | 6 | 12 | 3.5 | 4.9 | 22MB | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 5 7540U | 6 | 12 | 3.2 | 4.9 | 22MB | 15-30W |
| Ryzen 3 7440U | 4 | 8 | 3 | 4.7 | 12MB | 15-30W |
Framework announces that they’ll be using 7040U chips in AMD refresh
With this announcement, Framework has also confirmed that it’ll be using this 7840U for its upcoming 13-inch refresh, as an alternate option to Intel when selecting your build.
Of course, as the new Ryzen chips don’t support DDR4 RAM anymore, you’ll have to put in some extra legwork to upgrade the RAM modules on your board too. The fully upgradeable laptop requires DDR5 SO-DIMMs up to 5600MHz and a new Ryzen-compatible Wi-Fi card to run the new hardware for those coming from the last gen Intel motherboard.
Of course, Framework has already set these parts up in its marketplace store.