The AMD Ryzen 5 8540U is a mobile processor with 6 cores, launched in December 2023. It is part of the Ryzen 5 lineup, using the Zen 4 (Hawk Point) architecture with Socket FP7. Thanks to AMD Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) the core-count is effectively doubled, to 12 threads. Ryzen 5 8540U has 16 MB of L3 cache and operates at 3.2 GHz by default, but can boost up to 4.9 GHz, depending on the workload. AMD is making the Ryzen 5 8540U on a 4 nm production node using 20,900 million transistors. The silicon die of the chip is not fabricated at AMD, but at the foundry of TSMC. The multiplier is locked on Ryzen 5 8540U, which limits its overclocking potential.
With a TDP of 28 W, the Ryzen 5 8540U consumes only little energy. AMD's processor supports DDR5 memory with a dual-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 5600 MT/s, but with overclocking (and the right memory modules) you can go even higher. For communication with other components in the system, Ryzen 5 8540U uses a PCI-Express Gen 4 connection. This processor features the Radeon 740M integrated graphics solution.
Hardware virtualization is available on the Ryzen 5 8540U, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) can run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, AMD has added support for the newer AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions, too.