The company’s website now lists lower frequencies for the Phoenix APU than when it was revealed in January, and AMD has also canceled the previously planned PCIe 5.0 support.
In January, AMD revealed the new generation of mobile processors Ryzen 7040, also known as APU Phoenix. These monolithic SoCs with Zen 4 cores and integrated graphics of the RDNA 3 architecture are also manufactured using the 4nm process, so they should be very interesting and energy efficient. But not everything is ideal. It looks like AMD has already removed or degraded two parameters or features that were originally announced for Phoenix since the release.
It’s not uncommon for processors to end up with an originally planned feature inactive in the final product because the strategy changed, a bug was discovered, or it didn’t have time to tune. Usually, however, such a change takes place even before the parameters are communicated, so it can only be detected by comparing it with some leaked information. However, in the case of Phoenix, AMD changed the specifications very late, after the reveal.
Tip: AMD Ryzen 7040 for laptops is here: 4nm Phoenix APU has Zen 4, RDNA 3 GPU, new AI unit
The first of these unwelcome changes is the deterioration of connectivity specifications. At one time, AMD stated that Phoenix would support PCI Express 5.0. It appeared earlier in an unofficial rumor, but then also in the official roadmap that AMD showed last May. That APU Phoenix confirmed for the first time, but it was also clearly marked to provide PCI Express 5.0.
However, at the January unveiling, the company no longer announced PCI Express 5.0, and it looks like there was a reason for that. Meanwhile, representatives clarified that eventually these processors will still only provide PCI Express 4.0. It may not be such a problem, because so far this connectivity is only available for SSDs, but their controllers currently have a rather high consumption, which is not suitable for laptops. Perhaps even in the Phoenix APU, the PHYs and controllers were power inefficient in PCIe 5.0 mode. In this context, it is interesting that Intel may have done something similar as well. According to the slides leaked a long time before the release (as early as 2020), PCI Express 5.0 was planned in the Alder Lake mobile generation at least for the P series of processors. But then Intel was also forced or decided to turn on only PCIe 4.0 in the final product; PCIe 5.0 is only offered by the desktop platform and derived HX processors.
Slower GPU in Ryzen 7040HS
But it is noteworthy that the same thing happened once more with Phoenix, which raises questions whether the marketing was not too aggressive in those preliminary announcements and whether, on the contrary, the engineering part was not too careless in setting the parameters at the moment of that preliminary disclosure. The observant Twitter user Bionic_squash has noticed that the company has recently changed the specifications it lists on its website for the Phoenix APU integrated graphics.
AMD revealed three HS models (that is, the 35W series) in January, which you can see in the table from that time. The company’s website stated at the time that the boost frequencies of their GPUs are graded for them so that the Ryzen 9 7940HS has a GPU clock of up to 3000 MHz, the Ryzen 7 4840HS up to 2900 MHz and the Ryzen 5 7640HS (with a trimmed GPU with only 512 shaders) then had a clock of 2800 MHz. Currently, AMD’s website has 200 MHz lower numbers for all models – i.e. GPU clocks of 2800 MHz, 2700 MHz and 2600 MHz.
At the same time, the specifications of models differing by the suffix H instead of HS (i.e. Ryzen 9 7940H, Ryzen 7 7840H, Ryzen 5 7640H) appeared on AMD’s website. Traditionally, models with a more voracious 45W TDP and slightly higher clocks used to be marked in this way, but in this case, all parameters are exactly the same as for the HS models (and the TDP is stated to be adjustable between 35-54 W for both versions). It is not clear whether the H and HS models will be equivalent and the difference will only be the consumption settings in individual notebooks, or how to explain this.
The reduction in the clock speed of the integrated graphics could indicate that AMD, like the desktop standalone Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX, is not able to achieve as high clock rates as planned. However, this is data about the maximum frequency, which may not be so important for mobile gaming. The most important thing will be whether this change in parameters will also reduce the frequency held during a longer gaming load. It may be reduced less, but it’s hard to say how Phoenix behaves. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never get the chance to test processors with these final specs against pieces that would have the originally intended clocks, so whether and how much this reduced gaming performance remains unclear. But some drop against the theoretical previous configuration probably occurred.
Resources: Bionic_squash, Andreas Schilling. VideoCardz
