AMD today released its Ryzen 7040U series "Zen 4" mobile processors for the Ultraportable segment. These are processors with a 15 W TDP that's configurable up to 30 W by notebook designers to enable better boost frequency residency. AMD technically announced its entire Ryzen 7040 series at the 2023 International CES, but put out details for only the 7040HS series with a 28 W to 45 W TDP targeting thin-and-light and mainstream notebook form-factors. This would be the first time we're seeing details of the 7040U series. The company announced that processors in the 7040U series are shipping to notebook manufacturers, but it did not put out a specific date on which you can buy notebooks powered by these processors.

The Ryzen 7040U series consists of four processor models (SKUs). The lineup is led by the Ryzen 7 7840U, followed by the Ryzen 5 7640U, the Ryzen 5 7540U, and has the Ryzen 3 7440U at the entry level. All four processor models offer the latest "Zen 4" CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics. The Ryzen 7 7840U packs an 8-core/16-thread CPU clocked at 3.30 GHz with up to 5.10 GHz boost frequency. The Ryzen 5 7640U has a 6-core/12-thread CPU clocked at 3.50 GHz with up to 4.90 GHz boost. The Ryzen 5 7540U differs from the 7640U not just in slightly lower CPU clock speeds—3.20 GHz with up to 4.90 GHz boost—but also the lack of the XDNA Ryzen AI feature. The Ryzen 3 7440U has a leaner CPU still, with just 4-core/8-thread, clocked at 3.00 GHz with up to 4.70 GHz boost, half the shared L3 cache size of the other three models, and a lack of Ryzen AI.The 7840U features all 12 RDNA3 compute units physically present on the processor's iGPU, working out to 768 stream processors, and AMD has given this iGPU the branding Radeon 780M. The 7640U packs the Radeon 760M iGPU, which has 8 CU or 512 stream processors. The 7540U and 7440U come with the basic Radeon 740M, which has 4 CU (256 stream processors).All four processor models being launched today, are based on the 4 nm "Phoenix" monolithic silicon. This chip physically packs a single 8-core CCX based on the latest "Zen 4" microarchitecture. Each of the up to 8 CPU cores has 1 MB of dedicated L2 cache, and share up to 16 MB of L3 cache. The iGPU is based on the latest RDNA3 graphics architecture, and has up to 12 CU (compute units), worth 768 stream processors.AMD claims that the RDNA3 iGPU can be anywhere between 30% to 139% faster than the Iris Xe (Xe-LP) iGPU powering the competing Intel Core i7-1360P "Raptor Lake-U" processor. In terms of CPU performance, AMD claims between 5% to 75% faster performance than the Apple M2 SoC, and between 29% to 128% faster CPU performance than an Intel Core i7-1360P "Raptor Lake-U."