AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS vs AMD Ryzen AI 7 350

AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS

The Ryzen 7 8840HS is a powerful processor (APU) of the Hawk Point family. This isn't an entirely new laptop chip; instead, it's a rebadged Ryzen 7 7840U with a slightly higher wattage as well as higher clock speeds on the Ryzen AI NPU. The 8840HS has eight Zen 4 cores running at 3.3 GHz to 5.1 GHz that are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads, while the great Radeon 780M is responsible for 3D processing and similar duties.

Architecture & Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips are. That's not to say there is no difference between the three. With Hawk Point, AMD is betting big on generative AI; these processors are set to deliver an up to 40% increase in generative AI performance over 7040 series APUs, making apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Photoshop more useful than ever before.

Unlike Zen 3, Zen 4 features AVX512 support and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers, is slated to bring a double-digit IPC improvement over the former.

Elsewhere, the 8840HS has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-7500 RAM. The chip is compatible with USB 4 and therefore with Thunderbolt. It comes with 20 PCIe 4 lanes, giving NVMe SSDs up to 7.8 GB/s of throughput.

Systems built around this Ryzen 7 series APU are designed to run 64-bit Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10, or Linux. Please note that this processor is not overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable. It gets soldered down for good instead (FP7, FP7r2, FP8 socket interfaces).

Performance

Since this is a 7840U in disguise that we are dealing with here, it is safe to expect the 8840HS to be about as fast as the Core i7-12650H, 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 laptop is.

Graphics

The Radeon 780M has 12 CUs (768 shaders) purring away at up to 2,700 MHz. This is exactly the right iGPU for people looking for a bit more horsepower than what Intel's aging Xe options can provide. The Radeon will let you use up to 4 monitors with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p and it will also HW-decode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs (including AV1, HEVC and AVC) without breaking a sweat. In terms of gaming, the thing is good enough for 1080p and medium-to-low settings, as of late 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 28 W that laptop makers are free to tune to their liking, with values between 20 W and 30 W greenlighted by AMD. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.

The 8840HS is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.

AMD Ryzen AI 7 350

The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 is a powerful mobile processor from the Krackan Point family that was announced at CES in early 2025. The APU integrates 8 CPU cores (4x Zen 5 with up to 5 GHz and 4x Zen 5c with less cache and a maximum of 3.5 GHz) and a big 16 MB L3-Cache.

Architecture and features

The Krackan Point family APUs are powered by Zen 5 and Zen 5c microarchitecture cores located in separate clusters, the latter being a slightly slower, smaller and more energy efficient version of the former. One of the differences between Zen 5 and Zen 5c is the size of the cache; the Zen 5 cores have larger caches available.

However, the mobile Zen 5 implementation is reportedly (ChipsAndCheese) is closer to desktop Zen 4 than desktop Zen 5 due to the different cache sizes, large differences in AVX-512 throughput, and other factors.

Elsewhere, the Ryzen AI 7 chip supports DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-8000 RAM, giving system designers a choice between lower latency and higher throughput. The chip is natively compatible with USB 4 (and therefore Thunderbolt). It has PCIe 4.0 support for a throughput of 1.9 GB/s per lane, just like its 8000 series predecessors. The integrated XDNA 2 NPU, which is much more complex than the first generation XDNA, delivers up to 50 INT8 TOPS for accelerating various AI workloads.

As usual with laptop CPUs, the Ryzen 7 AI chip cannot be replaced by the user as it is soldered.

Performance

Thanks to the Zen 5 architecture and the high clock rates, the CPU performance should be very good.

Graphics

The Radeon 860M is the direct successor to the Radeon 760M and offers 8 cores (CUs = 512 shaders) and clocks at up to 3 GHz. It uses the new RDNA 3.5 architecture.

Power consumption

The AI 350 is said to have a base TDP of 28 W, although laptop manufacturers are free to set the TDP between 15 and 54 W.

The 4 nm TSMC process with which these CPUs are manufactured ensures above-average energy efficiency.