AMD: Ryzen Mobile 7040HS “Phoenix” Laptops Delayed Until April
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2023 4:05 PM EST
For everyone who has been eagerly waiting for the first laptops incorporating AMD’s monolithic Zen 4 mobile CPU, AMD sends word on a Friday afternoon that you’ll be waiting a little longer. Laptops based on AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 7040HS series CPUs have officially been delayed by a month, pushing their expected availability from March to April.
First detailed during AMD’s CES 2023 keynote, the Ryzen Mobile 7040HS series (codename Phoenix) is AMD’s first mobile-focused, monolithic die CPUs based on the Zen 4 architecture, and will be their flagship silicon for mobile devices for 2023. Besides incorporating AMD’s latest CPU architecture, Phoenix also adds into the mix an updated RDNA3 architecture iGPU, and for the first time in any AMD CPU, a dedicated AI processing block, which AMD has aptly named the Ryzen AI. All of which, in turn, is fabbed using TSMC’s 4nm process – making it the single most advanced piece of silicon out of AMD yet.
At the time of its announcement, laptops based on Phoenix were expected in March of this year (i.e. this month). However AMD has sent over a brief announcement on a sleepy Friday afternoon stating that devices based on the new chips have been pushed back a month, to April, citing “platform readiness.” AMD’s complete announcement is below:
To align with platform readiness and ensure the best possible user experience, we now expect our OEM partners to launch the first notebooks powered by Ryzen 7040HS Series processors in April.
Source: AMD PR
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brucethemoose - Saturday, March 18, 2023 - link
There will be no useful AI benchmarks at launch, because no one will know how to use it.The only thing that matters is app performance, and it will take some time to hack it into Stable Diffusion, the LLaMA repos and such. That even took time for Apple, and they literally paid engineers to develop their own Stable Diffusion fork.
mode_13h - Sunday, March 19, 2023 - link
> There will be no useful AI benchmarks at launch, because no one will know how to use it.I'm sure they'll have a couple of things working, like background removal and noise reduction for video conferencing. These will be 1st party plugins, or maybe developed in close partnership with 2nd party software vendors.
> it will take some time to hack it into Stable Diffusion
I doubt XDA could handle something like that. It's more about small, realtime models.
Samus - Sunday, March 19, 2023 - link
Probably firmware. Doubt its a hardware bug since the RDNA3 and ZEN4 cores are all carryover, but perhaps an issue with the AI cores? Can't be serious if they are delaying only a few weeks.dwillmore - Friday, March 17, 2023 - link
Am I alone in wishing that companies would just say what the problem is? I'd have a lot more respect for that level of honesty. Because, we've all been there when things all go south and something misses a launch window. It happens. Owning up to it doesn't seem to 'happen' as much as it should.ballsystemlord - Friday, March 17, 2023 - link
I second the motion.hallstein - Saturday, March 18, 2023 - link
It also stops people speculating wildly.mode_13h - Sunday, March 19, 2023 - link
If the problem involves some of their partner companies (either hardware or software), then it might not be AMD's decision to make.nfriedly - Friday, March 17, 2023 - link
That's cool, I'm sure the 35-45W 7040HS will be great when it arrives.But I really want to see some lower power chips for use in Steam deck-like handheld devices: I expect we'll see a 15-28W 7040U sometime this year.
A <10W Y-series chip with RDNA3 would be amazing if they could make it work, but I'm not sure if we'll ever get that. If it happened, though, it could be the heart of a true GPD Win 2 successor.
DaveLT - Saturday, March 18, 2023 - link
Yup there are 7040U samples floating around alreadybrucethemoose - Saturday, March 18, 2023 - link
The "cheap" SKUs also cut out most of the iGPU, and having the 8 core SKUs in a handheld is both costly and power inefficient (since it leeches power from the iGPU).Van Gogh was an anomaly that OEMs rejected until Valve picked it up, hence I don't think AMD will try that again.