Nerfed Ryzen 7040 Phoenix-HS APUs hit by significantly reduced GPU clocks as AMD also cuts PCIe 5 support from the chips

AMD announced the Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” APUs at CES 2023. The APUs which are scheduled to show up in laptops starting in March, include the Ryzen 5 7640HS, Ryzen 7 7840HS, and Ryzen 9 7940HS. We have previously reported that the RDNA 3 Radeon 780M iGPU on the Phoenix-HS APUs could be considerably more performant than the RDNA 2 Radeon 680M. The Radeon 780M even came out on par with an RX 570 desktop GPU in a separate showing.

Disappointingly, the retail Radeon 780M may end up performing worse than initially anticipated as AMD has reportedly downclocked the GPU before the release. According to Twitter user Bionic_squash, AMD has updated the spec sheets of the Phoenix-HS APUs on its website with 200 MHz lower graphics frequencies than originally mentioned.

Where the Ryzen 9 7940HS initially had a 3 GHz GPU clock target, the website now mentions a frequency of 2.8 GHz. Similarly, the Radeon 780M on the Ryzen 7 7840HS and the Radeon 760M on the Ryzen 5 7640HS have also been hit with a 200 MHz clock speed nerf and now stand at 2.7 and 2.6 GHz respectively. The seemingly reduced GPU frequencies will undoubtedly affect the performance of the Ryzen 7040HS iGPUs for the worse.

Furthermore, despite previously announcing that the Phoenix APUs will support PCIe Gen 5, AMD now only mentions PCIe Gen 4 support as reported by Andreas Schilling.

Sadly, we don’t know the exact reason for the reduction of the graphics frequencies of the Radeon 780M and Radeon 760M iGPUs inside the Phoenix-HS processors.

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