AMD officially announced the Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point processor
At the Advance AI event, AMD unveiled the first batch of products from their Ryzen 8040 series of mobile processors. Codenamed Hawk Point, this new generation of processors is an upgrade from the current Ryzen 7040 series Phoenix.
Similar to Phoenix, Hawk Point utilizes TSMC’s 6nm process, featuring a CPU based on the Zen 4 architecture and a GPU built on the RDNA 3 architecture. These attributes remain consistent with the previous generation. However, the Ryzen AI has been rebranded as NPU (Neural Processing Unit), offering enhanced computational power while still using the XDNA architecture.
AMD launched nine Ryzen 8040 series processors, including five with the HS suffix and four under the U category. Within the HS suffix range, three models fall under the 8045 series. However, unlike the current Ryzen 7045, which uses desktop processors, these are still part of Hawk Point. The Ryzen 8045HS and 8040HS differ primarily in their Thermal Design Power (TDP): the 8045HS models range from 35-54W, while the 8040HS models are between 20-30W.
The Ryzen 8045HS lineup consists of the Ryzen 9 8945HS, Ryzen 7 8845HS, and Ryzen 5 8645HS, corresponding to the previous generation’s Ryzen 9 7940HS, Ryzen 7 7840HS, and Ryzen 5 7640HS. The Ryzen 9/7 models feature eight cores with Radeon 780M integrated graphics, while the Ryzen 5 is a six-core processor equipped with Radeon 760M graphics.
The Ryzen 8040HS series includes the Ryzen 7 8840HS and Ryzen 5 8640HS. Their frequencies appear similar to the Ryzen 7 8845HS and Ryzen 5 8645HS, but with a reduced TDP from 35-54W to 20-30W, the frequency performance is inevitably affected.
The Ryzen 8040U series comprises four models: Ryzen 7 8840U, Ryzen 5 8640U, Ryzen 5 8540U, and Ryzen 3 8440U, with a TDP of 15-30W. Notably, the Ryzen 5 8540U and Ryzen 3 8440U lack an NPU, suggesting they utilize a hybrid architecture combining Zen 4 and Zen 4c cores. Additionally, these two models feature Radeon 740M graphics with only four Compute Units (CUs).
Compared to the current Ryzen 7040 series, the most significant enhancement in the Ryzen 8040 series is the NPU’s performance, which has seen a notable increase from 10 TOPS to 16 TOPS. This enhancement boosts generative AI workload performance by 40%, for tasks like Llama 2 and Vision Models.
AMD confirmed the launch of the Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors for the first quarter of 2024. The exact release date remains unspecified, but it is expected to be more successful than this year’s Ryzen 7040 series launch. According to previous reports, AMD has already begun shipping to its partners.
