AMD Ryzen 5 8540U

The Ryzen 5 8540U is a mid-range laptop chip that saw the light of day in Q4 2023. This Hawk Point family processor isn't actually a new processor; instead, it's a rebadged Ryzen 5 7545U with no differences between the two to report. As such, the 8540U has two Zen 4 cores and four Zen 4c cores working together under the same roof. In this sense, this is a bigger, stronger brother of the Ryzen 3 8440U (and by extention the Ryzen 3 7440U).

The six cores run at 3.2 GHz to 4.9 GHz and are all SMT-enabled for 12 processing threads. While there is no Ryzen AI support here, at least the users still are getting the modern Radeon 740M integrated graphics adapter.

Architecture & Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips are. Unlike Zen 3, Zen 4 features AVX512 support and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers across the board, is slated to deliver a double-digit IPC improvement over the former.

Elswehere, the 8540U has a 16 MB L3 cache and a very fast DDR5-5600 / LPDDR5x-7500 memory controller. The processor has full USB 4 support and thus Thunderbolt is supported as well. Its fourteen PCIe 4 lanes are more than sufficient for connecting a couple of speedy NVMe SSDs and a discrete graphics card; OS support is limited to 64-bit Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10 and of course to Linux.

Like most laptop processors sold today, the 8540U is not overclockable and neither will you be able to replace it with a faster processor as it gets soldered down for good (FP7 or FP7r2 socket interface).

Performance

It's safe to expect the chip to be about as fast as hexa-core, Zen 3 Plus-powered laptop chips are, such as the Ryzen 5 6600U, as far as multi-thread performance is concerned. 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 740M has 4 CUs (256 shaders) at its disposal that run at up to 2,800 MHz. While this iGPU technically supports both ray tracing and DX12 Ultimate, it's not really fast enough for most triple-A games released in 2023 and 2022. It will however let you use up to 4 monitors with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p, and more importantly it is capable of HW-decoding and HW-encoding the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1.

Power consumption

This Ryzen 5 series APU has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 28 W that laptop makers are allowed to change to anything between 15 W and 30 W. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.

The 8540U is built with the 4 nm TSMC process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.

Series	AMD Hawk Point (Zen 4/4c, Ryzen 8040)
Codename	Hawk Point-U (Zen 4 + Zen 4c)
Series: Hawk Point (Zen 4/4c, Ryzen 8040) Hawk Point-U (Zen 4 + Zen 4c) AMD Ryzen 5 8540U « 3.2 - 4.9 GHz 6 / 12  16 MB L3 AMD Ryzen 3 8440U 3 - 4.7 GHz 4 / 8  8 MB L3
Clock Rate	3200 - 4900 MHz
Level 1 Cache	384 KB
Level 2 Cache	6 MB
Level 3 Cache	16 MB
Number of Cores / Threads	6 / 12 2 x 4.9 GHz AMD Zen 4 4 x 4.9 GHz AMD Zen 4c
Power Consumption (TDP = Thermal Design Power)	28 Watt
Manufacturing Technology	4 nm
Die Size	178 mm2
Max. Temperature	100 °C
Socket	FP7/FP7r2
Features	DDR5-5600/LPDDR5x-7500 RAM, PCIe 4, AES, AVX, AVX2, AVX512, FMA3, MMX (+), SHA, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, SSE4A, SSSE3
GPU	AMD Radeon 740M ( - 2800 MHz)
64 Bit	64 Bit support
Architecture	x86
Announcement Date	12/06/2023
Product Link (external)	www.amd.com

Benchmarks

- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance

No reviews found for this CPU (yet).