Apple A10 Fusion vs AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS

Apple A10 Fusion

The Apple A10 Fusion is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple that is built into the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. It integrates four 64 Bit cores that are divided in two clusters. Two high performance cores are clocked at up to 2.34 GHz and should be around 40% faster than the Apple A9 (according to Apple) and two low power cores (up to 1.1 GHz?). Up to now its unclear if all four cores can be used at once (that need only 1/5 th of the energy in some use cases). At the release of the iPhone 7 it looks like that IOS is only using two cores at a time and automatically switches between the two clusters. Therefore, apps are seeing only a dual core. The principle is similar to the first generation of ARMs big.LITTLE concept.

The integrated graphics card of the SoC will most likely stem from PowerVR (again) and perform 50% faster at 2/3 of the power consumption (according to Apple). 

All in all the chip includes 3.3 billion transistors, which is more than a current AMD Bristol Ridge (3.1) and Skylake Quad-Core (1.75)  X86 SoCs.

Sources: Apple Keynote, Ars Technica

AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS

The Ryzen 7 7840HS is a powerful Phoenix family chip that saw the light of day in H1 2023. The processor features 8 cores (16 threads thanks to SMT support) running at 3.8 GHz. The highest Boost clock speed achievable is 5.1 GHz.

Not only does this APU has full might of the Zen 4 architecture at its disposal, it also comes with the new Ryzen AI technology that's set to make generative AI more ubiquitous than ever before. Last but not the least, the Radeon 780M serves as the integrated GPU.

Architecture & Features

Phoenix family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Dragon Range family chips are. The latter however lacks hardware AI workload acceleration capabilities that Phoenix has. Ryzen AI is coming after Intel's DL Boost and GNA technologies; time will tell if this move by AMD is a good idea.

Perhaps more importantly, Zen 4 introduces AVX512 support (which Zen 3 chips did not have) and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers across the board, is set to bring a double-digit IPC improvement.

Elsewhere, the 7840HS has 16 MB of L3 cache and a seriously fast RAM controller (up to LPDDR5x-7500 and up to DDR5-5600, ECC-enabled memory included). PCI-Express speeds are capped at 1.97 GB/s per lane which corresponds to the 4.0 spec.

This Ryzen 7 series chip is designed to run 64-bit Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10 or Linux; please note that it isn't overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable. It gets soldered down for good instead (FP7, FP7r2, FP8 socket interfaces).

Performance

The average 7840HS in our database is in the same league as the Core i7-12700H, Core i7-12850HX, Core i9-12900H, Core i9-13900H and also the Ryzen 9 7940HS, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. This is a very fast chip, as of Q3 2023.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of your system is.

Graphics

The Radeon 780M (12 CUs / 768 shaders, up to 2,700 MHz) is capable of powering 4 monitors simultaneously with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p. It will also have little issue hardware-encoding and hardware-decoding the most widely used video codecs (AV1, HEVC, AVC). As far as gaming is concerned, the thing will let you play most games at 1080p as long as you are fine with moderate quality settings. Long story short, this is the best iGPU money can buy, as of H2 2023.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is (there is no dedicated VRAM here).

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 35 W to 54 W, giving system makers a choice between improving battery life and making the system they're designing insanely fast. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for a laptop or a mini-PC built around this APU.

The 7840HS is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.