Like previous editions of CES, this year brings a series of news and this time there is more news than usual for PC users. This year, Three Dragons Intel, Nvidia, and AMD have had a big hit in laptops, with new processors and graphics cards ensuring a long line of new laptop models from major PC manufacturers.
The Intel Core 13000 “Raptor Lake” and the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4000 “Ada Lovelace” are now followed by AMD, which brings two new families of processors to laptops. First and foremost is the “Dragon Range” codename that brings the desktop Ryzen 7000 series into portable form. Thus it inherits all the characteristics of “Raphael” and no less than 16 cores of Zen 4 architecture with 32 threads and 64MB of L3 cache.
The new processors are included in Ryzen 7045series and is delivered in four designs. At the top is the Ryzen 9 7945HX with 16 cores and 32 threads at up to 5.4GHz with a TDP value of 55-75W, this is followed by the 12-core Ryzen 9 7845HX with a frequency of up to 5.2GHz with a TDP from below is the Ryzen 7 7745HX processor Eight-core up to 5.1GHz and six-core Ryzen 5 7645HX up to 5.0GHz, both of which share 32MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 45-75W.
What the quad has in common is that the processor cores themselves are manufactured at 5nm at TSMC and these are connected to the IO circuit. The latter is manufactured at 6 nm and provides a 128-bit memory bus with DDR5 support with an effective clock frequency of 5200 MHz. The graphics part with only two computing units of the RDNA 2 architecture, which is primarily intended for rendering images on the screen, is also found in a portable version when a dedicated graphics card is in sleep mode.
The Dragon Range is “Raphael” desktop with a mobile version, while “Phoenix” is a new beast from AMD. The circuit is manufactured on TSMC’s most advanced 4nm process and is not chip– based rather than monolithic, the latter making it a more energy-efficient solution for extending battery life in a portable format.
Codename Phoenix is included in Ryzen 7040Thread and delivers up to 8 cores and 16 threads, plus 32MB of L3 cache — double the 16MB of the Ryzen 6000 “Rembrandt” series. At the top is the Ryzen 9 7940HS with eight cores up to 5.2GHz, followed by the Ryzen 7 7840HS with up to 5.1GHz and the six-core Ryzen 5 7640HS with up to 5.0GHz. Common to all TDP values from 35-54W.
Other differences in the Ryzen 7040 series are the dual-channel memory, which supports DDR5 at 5600MHz and the more energy efficient LPDDR5X at 7500MHz. The graphics part clocks in at 12 CUs clocked at 3.0GHz from the latest RDNA 3 architecture, which should be enough to play at 1080p with lower settings.
Fringe but still big news in the Ryzen 7040 series is that it’s the first to use technology from FPGA manufacturer Xilinx, which AMD acquired in 2022. AMD calls its technology XDNA AI Engine and as the name reveals, the focus is on artificial intelligence (AI) and learning. Automated (ML). Like an FPGA, this is programmable and should be able to be used for different purposes, more power efficient than if the same tasks were performed by the CPU or GPU part.
Battery life is something that AMD has had great success with, primarily with the Ryzen 7040 series. With this, AMD promises a potential for “30+ hours” on light use, which should usually be taken with a grain of salt. Despite this, it’s still worth noting that there are plenty of gaming laptops out there with the Ryzen 4000 series onwards that can deliver a long battery life of around 10 hours or more when used non-gaming.
The fact that processors have a TDP range, also called configurable TDP (cTDP), instead of a fixed range is to give computer manufacturers expanded capabilities when developing new models. AMD’s Ryzen 7045 series is primarily aimed at larger, heavier, higher-performance gaming laptops, where a higher ceiling could be used for thicker body designs and vice versa. The AMD Ryzen 7040 series is aimed at slim gaming PCs, something usually defined as a chassis design that’s less than 20mm thin.
The AMD Ryzen 7045 “Dragon Range” will be the first to enter the scene in gaming laptops, which should be available at retail in February. The more power-efficient Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” hits stores a month later in March. It’s not clear how many different PC models will be available in Phase 1, but for the whole year AMD is talking about more than 250 pieces.
While the Phoenix’s current focus is on gaming laptops, the same circuit should be released in the future with TDP values from 15 to 28W, for use in slim models without a gaming focus. When this is supposed to happen is not yet known.
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