CES 2023 | AMD details 4 nm Zen 4 Ryzen 7040 Phoenix-HS APUs with integrated Xilinx AI smarts alongside refreshed Zen 3 and Zen3+ offerings

Phoenix-HS brings Zen 4 with RDNA 3 for the first time to mainstream laptops. There are only SKUs in this segment including the 6C/12T Ryzen 5 7640HS, 8C/16T Ryzen 7 7840HS, and the 8C/16T Ryzen 9 7940HS. These APUs offer a 40 MB cache with the exception of the Ryzen 5 7640HS that is equipped with 38 MB cache.

Laptops powered by Ryzen 7040 Phoenix-HS will hit the shelves starting March 2023.

Intel emphasized on integrating its Movidius VPU AI accelerator in select Raptor Lake-H processors. Now, AMD is doing the same with Phoenix-HS. The company's recent acquisition of Xilinx has led to the creation of an XDNA AI Engine, which the company says has been integrated into select Ryzen 7040 Phoenix-HS processors.

According to AMD, Ryzen AI in Phoenix-HS can offload tasks such as communications and battery management from the CPU/GPU with very little power consumption. Ryzen AI is said to be faster than even the Neural Engine found in Apple M2 SoCs. 

The company did confirm that Ryzen AI is not a one-off feature and is committing to a long-term investment with XDNA 2 and XDNA 3 architectures planned in the future.

As is the case with Intel Movidius, Microsoft will be leveraging Ryzen AI capabilities with Windows Studio Effects and other platform security features.

AMD will be reusing some of the Zen 3 and Zen 3+ chips in new refreshes. Firstly, we have the 6 nm Rembrandt-R that includes Ryzen 7035 APUs in both HS and U variants. Rembrandt-R will start from the 4C/8T Ryzen 3 7335U and tops out with the 8C/16T Ryzen 7 7735HS. Rembrandt-R Ryzen 7035 HS will offer integrated Radeon 680M graphics while the U series includes SKUs that offer either the Radeon 680M or the Radeon 660M.