AMD’s new Ryzen 8040 laptop chips look a lot like the Ryzen 7040 CPUs

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 8040 series is a lot like the 7040 series but with a higher model number. (credit: AMD)

Both Intel and AMD usually have processor updates to announce at CES in January, but AMD isn’t waiting to introduce its next-generation flagship laptop chips: the Ryzen 8040 series is coming to laptops starting in early 2024, though at first blush these chips look awfully similar to the Ryzen 7040 processors that AMD announced just seven months ago.

Though the generational branding is jumping from 7000 to 8000, the CPU and GPU of the Ryzen 8040 series are nearly identical to the ones in the 7040 series. The chips AMD is announcing today use up to eight Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3-based integrated GPUs (either a Radeon 780M with 12 compute units, or Radeon 760M or 740M GPUs with 8 or 4 CUs). The chips are manufactured using the same 4 nm TSMC process as the 7040 series.

There’s also an AI-accelerating neural processing unit (NPU) that AMD claims is about 1.4 times faster than the one in the Ryzen 7040 series in large language models like Llama 2 and ONNX vision models. Both NPUs are based on the same XDNA architecture and have the same amount of processing hardware—AMD says that the AI performance improvements come mostly from higher clock speeds.