AMD Says its New Mobile CPUs Can Beat Apple Silicon

Image: AMD

AMD on Wednesday unveiled a slew of new Ryzen 7000 series processors with “Zen 4” cores at CES 2023.

The highlights of the CPU/GPU giant’s CES announcements were three new Ryzen 7000X3D series desktop chips that feature AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology and succeed last year’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which was arguably the crown jewel of the company’s 5000 series lineup.

AMD’s new X3D CPUs will be available starting February 2023 and even include a 16-core, 24-thread behemoth with a whopping 144MB of cache in the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. In addition, the company showcased three new non-X desktop processors that will join its Ryzen 7000 series lineup starting January 10.

However, AMD didn’t stop at just desktop chips. The company announced some powerful new mobile processors as well, claiming that its Ryzen 7040HS series laptop CPUs offer up to 34% faster multithreaded performance than Apple’s custom M1 Pro chip.

According to AMD’s disclaimer, the company tested its 7940HS against the M1 Pro in a slate of programs that included DaVinci Resolve BlackMagic, V-Ray, Blender, Cinebench R23 nT, and Handbrake 1:5:1. The two systems that were compared had the following specs:

Ryzen™ 9 7940HS system: AMD reference motherboard configured with 4x4GB LPDDR5, 1TB SSD, Radeon 780M Graphics, Windows® 11 64-bit. Apple M1 Pro system: Macbook M1 Pro 18 configured with 32GB LPDDR5, 1TB SSD, MacOS Monterey (12.6.1).

What’s more, the Ryzen 7040HS series CPUs aren’t even AMD’s most performant laptop offerings from this generation. The company also announced the Ryzen 7045HX lineup of mobile chips, which features up to an almost ridiculous 16 cores and 32 threads in a laptop.

During its presentation, AMD also unveiled Ryzen AI, the first dedicated artificial intelligence hardware in an x86 processor, for select chips. Ryzen AI will be available on the new Ryzen 7040 series mobile processors and brings AMD XDNA adaptive AI architecture to laptop computing, delivering more performance for real-time AI experiences.

“Ryzen processors with Ryzen AI outperform the Apple M2 CPU by up to 20% while being up to 50% more energy efficient,” the company claimed.

The first laptops with AMD’s new 7045HX and 7040HS will start shipping in February and March 2023, respectively. AMD’s claims of beating Apple Silicon likely won’t go unanswered for long, since Apple is expected to unveil refreshed 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips sometime this spring.

P.S. - Like our news? Support the site with a coffee/beer. Or shop with our Amazon link. We use affiliate links when possible--thank you for supporting independent media.