AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS vs Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100

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.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100

The Snapdragon X Plus 8-core (X1P-42-100) is a relatively affordable ARM architecture processor for use in Windows laptops that was unveiled in Sep 2024. This Qualcomm SoC features 8 Oryon CPU cores running at up to 3.4 GHz, along with the 1.7 TFLOPS X1-45 iGPU and the 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU. The super-fast LPDDR5x-8448 memory controller, USB 4.0 support, TB 4 support and PCIe 4 support are all onboard as well.

Architecture and Features

The Oryon cores (2 clusters of essentially identical cores; 8 threads) are mostly based on Nuvia IP and they reportedly make use of the ARM v8.7 microarchitecture. Much like modern AMD and Intel processors, the Snapdragon chip is compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt 4 however it does not appear to support eGPUs as of September 2024.

The X1P-42-100 is based on the smaller die codenamed Purwa, unlike most X Elite and X Plus processors. It is believed to have at least 8 PCIe 4 and 4 PCIe 3 lanes for connecting various kinds of devices. NVMe SSDs are supported with a throughput of up to 7.9 GB/s; furthermore, most laptops built around the chip are expected to have 16 GB of LPDDR5x-8448 RAM. There is also a 45 TOPS NPU present for accelerating AI workloads.

Performance

A lot depends on the power targets of a specific system, just like it is with AMD, Intel and Nvidia products. That being said, the average X1P-42-100 competes with older chips such as the Core i5-1245U when executing multi-threaded x86 code. With apps compiled specifically with Windows on ARM in mind, a Core i7-1360P-like performance level is to be expected which is not bad at all for what is supposed to be a budget CPU.

The 3.4 GHz clock speed is only achievable in single-thread workloads. When under multi-threaded load, the CPU cores will run at no more than 3.2 GHz.

Graphics

The X1-45 used here delivers up to 1.7 TFLOPS of performance. Unlike the much faster 3.8 TFLOPS and 4.6 TFLOPS X1-85 iGPUs, this little guy here has much fewer unified shaders and runs at lower clock speeds, too. Games put it a little behind the GeForce MX350; this kind of performance is sufficient for older games and sub-900p resolutions only.

AVC, HEVC and AV1 video codecs can be both hardware-decoded and hardware-encoded whereas with VP9, only decoding is possible. The highest monitor resolution supported is UHD 2160p.

Power consumption

Expect to see anything between 15 W and 30 W under long-term workloads depending on the system and the power profile chosen. The number includes RAM.

The SoC is built with TSMC's N4P process for better-than-average power efficiency, as of H2 2024.