Preliminary Ryzen 9 7940HS performance figure fails to impress as AMD's flagship "Phoenix" APU trails behind Core i9-12900H

AMD announced the “Phoneix” APU lineup at CES 2023. Comprising a Zen 4 Ryzen CPU and an RDNA 3 Radeon iGPU, the lineup includes the Ryzen 5 7640HS, the Ryzen 7 7840HS, and the Ryzen 9 7940HS. The Ryzen 9 7940HS is the most powerful of the trio with 8 cores, 16 threads, 40 MB of cache, a TDP envelope of 35-54 W, and a base and boost clock of 4 GHz and 5.2 GHz respectively. Additionally, the APU rocks a 12-CU Radeon 780M iGPU.

While notebooks rocking the new Phoenix APUs are scheduled to start appearing in March, 3DMark Time Spy CPU and graphics scores of the Ryzen 9 7940HS have now come to the surface courtesy of Golden Pig Upgrade on Bilibili (via HXL on Twitter). But before we dive into the data, please note that these are preliminary figures and final performance may end up exceeding the level shown here. This holds especially true for the integrated Radeon 780M that may not be running with release drivers.

First, the Ryzen 9 7940HS scored 11,343 points in the 3DMark Time Spy CPU test with a 54 W power budget. Understandably, dropping the power to just 25 W saw the score tank to 8,448. By comparison, the Core i9-12900H with a TDP value of 45 and a PL1 value of 60 W managed a median score of 12,449 in our 3DMark Time Spy CPU test, roughly 10% more than the Ryzen 9 7940HS.

That said, even in this pre-release benchmark the Ryzen 9 7940HS proved to be 13.5% faster in 3DMark Time Spy CPU vs the Ryzen 9 6900HX based on the Zen 3 APU’s median score per our tests.

On the GPU side, the Radeon 780M managed to score 2,791 points in 3DMark Time Spy Graphics in 54 W mode. The score decreased slightly to 2,486 when the TDP was limited to 25 W. The Radeon 780M’s 54 W figure is about 22% better than the Radeon 680M. Since the RDNA 3 iGPU might likely be running with pre-release software, It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine the Radeon 780M performing even faster with finished drivers.

All in all, while this debut showing of the Ryzen 9 7940HS is a bit underwhelming, it would be wise to hold off on final verdicts until reviewers get their hands on the APU.

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