AMD Finally Launches Ryzen 7040HS Series APUs, With New Razer Blade Leading The Way
AMD Finally Launches Ryzen 7040HS Series APUs, With New Razer Blade Leading The Way
AMD‘s much anticipated Ryzen 7040HS has faced a bit of delays before it is finally launched today – the new Zen 4-powered silicon also features the XDNA-powered Ryzen AI secret sauce that the company touts is currently exclusive among all Windows x86 laptops so far.
The Ryzen 7040HS series will feature three models – Ryzen 5 7640HS, Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS. The Ryzen 5 will feature 6 cores and 5.0GHz boost clock; meanwhile Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 both get 8 cores, with 5.1GHz and 5.2GHz boost clocks respectively. All chips feature the same 35-54W TDP, as well as the aforementioned Ryzen AI processing unit.
The company’s decision to include dedicated AI accelerators in its APU portfolio is the result of its acquisition of Xilinx, another chipmaker specializing in FPGAs and AI-related chips. To utilize the new hardware, Windows has already included a few built-in AI-enhanced features into Windows 11, of which the webcam now gains capabilities to blur background, zoom on the subject and even pan across the camera as needed. You’ll need an AI-capable chip to expose these options – and currently only Ryzen 7040HS (and 7040U) supports it.
Another key point the chipmaker has pointed out is relating to security and privacy. Some features such as photo tagging relies on the cloud to process data, and AMD hopes that by bringing the processing locally, it’ll no longer require active internet connections to send data for AI processing, and avoids the data from being used as a training dataset.
In conjunction with the launch of newest Zen 4 APU family, Razer is also announcing the updated Blade 14 laptop, with Ryzen 9 7940HS paired with either 140W RTX 4060 or RTX 4070 Laptop GPUs available to choose from. It is currently on pre-order and global availability is set on June 20, with prices starting at $2,399.
Pokdepinion: The Ryzen AI is definitely a promising prospect – who knows if one day it might be powerful enough to run AI chatbot locally? That’d be a game changer.
