At CES 2023, AMD took the wraps off five new 7000 Series processor families destined for laptops in the coming months. One of the most interesting families was the Ryzen 7040 Series ‘Phoenix’ chips as, based on the outline specs shared by AMD, they were the only new laptop APUs that feature the most modern charms of Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 graphics. Now an official spec sheet for the AMD Ryzen 7 7840H shows a lot more detail for one of the Phoenix family members. And it's notable for its lack of PCIe 5.0 support.
If you hit the AMD spec link in the intro (official AMD's Chinese site), you will see that the 7840H features PCIe 4.0, with 20 native lanes, which all are usable by components such as graphics and storage. According to AMD, Phoenix chips are destined for ‘Ultimate Ultrathin’ laptops, and while many won’t feature dedicated GPUs, instead relying on the decent RDNA 3 onboard graphics, there is still a full PCIe 4.0 x16 interface available. That leaves a PCIe 4.0 x4 link for a CPU-attached M.2 NVMe slot.
On the topic of the onboard RDNA 3 graphics, the best Phoenix chips will feature 12 CUs (768 stream processors), running at up to 2.9GHz; this configuration is dubbed Radeon 780M by AMD. We have already seen some early 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks of this iGPU in action, and it was about 25% faster than its predecessor (RDNA 2 architecture Radeon 680M). In those tests, it was more or less on par with the GeForce RTX 2050 laptop GPU.
Another interesting aspect of AMD Phoenix is its memory support. The Ryzen 7 7840H specs show that it supports both LPDDR5 and LPDDR5x Ram types, and the native speeds supported are DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5-7600. Meanwhile, the memory controller appears to facilitate a capacity boost, with Phoenix chips supporting up to 256GB of RAM. That's another feature that appears to be an improvement on the ‘Ultra Enthusiast’ targeted Ryzen 7045 ‘Dragon Range’ laptop processors.
Some other specs confirmed by the Chinese product information sheets is the CCD die size, 178mm2. The L3 cache configuration in this instance is 16MB. Most of the other specs have been well-known for the last month, as you can see from the embedded slides from AMD’s CES 2023 presentation, above. Laptops featuring these processors should be on shelves starting in March.
Remember that AMD Ryzen 7045 ‘Dragon Range’ chips will be the most powerful CPUs in the laptop range, with up to 16C / 32T Zen 4 cores, with up to 80MB cache. However, this processor will feature a small RNDA 2 iGPU, as it will invariably feature in gaming and creator laptops with strong discrete graphics solutions. Also, contrasting with Phoenix, Dragon Range has 28 PCIe Gen 5 lanes (with 24 usable, therefore enough for an x16 GPU and a pair of x4 SSDs).
