It’s a pretty good time to be an AMD fan. The Red Team’s desktop processors include the fastest gaming CPU we’ve ever tested, while its Radeon graphics card business is increasingly competitive with a forward-looking ‘chiplet’ design and two flavours of frame generation tech. AMD also appears to be making inroads in the laptop space, where its new X3D laptop CPUs have been achieving some impressive performance. However, there’s another laptop innovation that’s gone relatively unheralded – that of the Ryzen 9 7940HS, AMD’s first laptop CPU with dedicated AI hardware.
We’ve been playing with a Razer Blade 14 laptop that sports the new chip, to see what difference AI acceleration makes – and how competitive the Ryzen 9 7940HS is when paired with an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card.
Let’s start by getting a sense of this 7940HS CPU. This is a 4nm Zen 4 part with eight cores and sixteen threads, matching the desktop Ryzen 7 7700, with 25 billion transistors, a single-core boost clock of 5.2GHz and a TDP configurable from 35W to 54W. That’s a lot of performance on tap – without even mentioning its XDNA AI engine, produced by AMD and recent acquisition Xilinx, branded here as Ryzen AI.
