What just happened? Intel and AMD both posted losses this week. Team Red lost their schedule at the last minute and had to push back this month’s launch of the 7040HS series to April. Team Blue said goodbye to a never-before-released specialized accelerator – RIP Thunder Bay.
Announced at CES 2023, AMD’s recently released Ryzen 7040HS series (codenamed Phoenix) 7045 high Series based on on Zen 4 and use a TSMC N4 node, but the similarities stop there. The HS series features a threaded die that combines an RDNA3 GPU with up to eight cores, and the HX series uses a small chip design carried over from the desktop series with only an integrated core RDNA2 GPU but up to 16 cores.
Late Friday afternoon, AMD announced that the 7040HS series was delay for a month to resolve the defect. “We now expect our OEM partners to release their first laptops powered by Ryzen 7040HS processors in April,” Team Red said in a press release.
Phoenix
| model | cores/threads | base/hour reinforcement | L2 + L3 cache | GPUs | cTDP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R9 7940HS | 8/16 | 4.0 / 5.2 GHz | 24 MB | 12 | 35-54 watts |
| R7 7840HS | 8/16 | 3.8 / 5.1 GHz | 24 MB | 12 | 35-54 watts |
| R5 7640HS | 6/12 | 4.3 / 5.0 GHz | 22 MB | 8 | 35-54 watts |
There are three models in the HS series: the R9 7940HS and R7 7840HS with eight cores each and the R5 7640HS with six. All three have roughly 5GHz boost clocks and are targeting the 35-54W power segment. The CPUs also come equipped with dedicated AI accelerators, and the modest integrated RDNA3 GPU clocks in under 3GHz, aiming to compete with the GTX 1650.
Thunder Bay
Intel started sending out patches to the Linux kernel last week that removed support for the Thunder Bay SoC. Voronex is found Explanation in the dismal patch note: “Product canceled, no customers or end users”.
Thunder Bay was the SoC codename that Intel first referenced in its Linux kernel submissions in 2021. Combined, rumor said, Movidius VPUs (Visual Processing Units) with Xeon cores, but the now removed drivers revealed it had Arm A53 cores instead.
Don’t worry if the name Movidius makes you scratch your head. The company, which makes AI accelerators for Internet of Things applications, was acquired by Intel in 2016, and has phased out its trademark. Intel has been quietly releasing Movidius VPUs every couple of years since then but has mostly integrated the technology into its other lines, including 13th-generation Core CPUs as an AI unit.
Team Blue may not have abandoned plans to develop accelerators like Thunder Bay but has paused them as part of its latest cost-cutting efforts.
