Lenovo is putting finishing touches on the Yoga Slim 7 14 2024, one of the first non-reference laptop to feature Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X processor. Leaked images circulating on X (formerly Twitter) reveal a sleek and stylish design, with a 14-inch or 14.5-inch display encased in a slim and portable form factor. Qualcomm has previously showcased eye-catching demo reference systems in a striking red color scheme, but Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7 14 2024 marks the first time a significant laptop manufacturer with actual product images incorporating the Snapdragon X chip. The Yoga Slim 7 14 2024 is part of Lenovo's popular Slim laptop lineup, including models powered by Intel and AMD processors. The latest "Gen 8" iteration featured options for AMD Ryzen 7040 series and Intel 13th Gen Core i and Core Ultra series CPUs.

One notable addition to the Snapdragon X-powered model is the inclusion of a dedicated Microsoft Copilot button. Qualcomm has heavily touted the Snapdragon X's Neural Processing Unit (NPU) performance and its ability to directly accelerate various AI and machine learning algorithms on the device. There have been a few comparison points between Meteor Lake with Intel's NPU and Snapdragon X Elite with Qualcomm's NPU. The chipmaker's X Elite and X Plus laptop offerings are expected to arrive soon, and there are strong indications that this may happen during the Computex trade show.Update 17:28 UTC: X user WalkingCat has posted images of Lenovo Thinkpad T14s laptop, which can be seen below.

AMD's Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" mobile APUs debuted last year with Ryzen AI capabilities (via onboard Xilinx IP), thanks to the fitting of an on-board NPU—Team Red's first generation XDNA AI Engine received immediate support on Windows platforms. Naturally, Linux users expressed frustration about being left out in the cold—later on in the year, AMD put some feelers out (as reported by Phoronix), and gauged interest in a potential Linux deployment of Ryzen AI. Fast forward to January 2024, we see movement with an initial release on open platforms—according to Michael Larabel's latest article: "More than 1,000 requests for Linux support were logged following that October statement and since then I've been hearing quietly of AMD working on Linux support... Well, there's now an open-source but currently out-of-tree driver available. "

AMD's GitHub has been updated with the "first public code drop of the XDNA Linux driver." According to System Requirements, the entry point "to run AI applications (test machine) on an Ryzen AI processor" is Phoenix silicon, as expected. Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" is presumably on the support list, since it shares the same basic underpinnings—albeit with greater NPU performance. One of AMD's GitHub authors has teased that "Strix" will also be supported in the future—second generation XDNA NPUs are expected to drop later this year. Targets for GFX1150 and GFX1151 were uncovered earlier this week—"Strix Point" and "Strix Point Halo" (respectively) are codenames for next generation Team Red APUs.

Back at the Schenker booth, we also spied the Tuxedo Computers Sirius 16. Schenker is the OEM/SI for this brand, which specializes in notebooks, mobile workstations, mini-PCs, commercial desktops, and large workstations; with the singular design goal of making them 100% compatible with and optimized for popular PC Linux distributions, hence the name. These Linux-friendly PCs are designed and assembled in Germany. The Tuxedo Sirius 16, as its name suggests, features a 16-inch 16:9 1440p display; and an illuminated keyboard. All its ports, connectors, audio, and networking interfaces have been tested for 100% compatibility and performance on Linux.

Under the hood is an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS "Phoenix" processor, with its 8-core/16-thread "Zen 4" CPU, and a cTDP set by Tuxedo at 54 W. This is paired with dual-channel DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, with options going all the way up to 96 GB. Graphics is care of a discrete AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT with 8 GB of memory, and 130 W configured power limit. The notebook features an all-metal chassis, and since the cooling solution isn't as elaborate on the XMG Neo 17 with its bulky 150 W CPU and 175 W GPU; Schenker used the space to cram in an 80 Wh battery (whereas the XMG Neo 17 has a 99 Wh pack). The 40 Gbps USB4 port from the "Phoenix" SoC is wired out. Neato.

AMD today announced the new Ryzen 8040 mobile processor series codenamed "Hawk Point." These chips are shipping to notebook manufacturers now, and the first notebooks powered by these should be available to consumers in Q1-2024. At the heart of this processor is a significantly faster neural processing unit (NPU), designed to accelerate AI applications that will become relevant next year, as Microsoft prepares to launch Windows 12, and software vendors make greater use of generative AI in consumer applications.

The Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" processor is almost identical in design and features to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix," except for a faster Ryzen AI NPU. While this is based on the same first-generation XDNA architecture, its NPU performance has been increased to 16 TOPS, compared to 10 TOPS of the NPU on the "Phoenix" silicon. AMD is taking a whole-of-silicon approach to AI acceleration, which includes not just the NPU, but also the "Zen 4" CPU cores that support the AVX-512 VNNI instruction set that's relevant to AI; and the iGPU based on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, with each of its compute unit featuring two AI accelerators, components that make the SIMD cores crunch matrix math. The whole-of-silicon performance figures for "Phoenix" is 33 TOPS; while "Hawk Point" boasts of 39 TOPS. In benchmarks by AMD, "Hawk Point" is shown delivering a 40% improvement in vision models, and Llama 2, over the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series.

AMD's "Phoenix" monolithic processor silicon drives the company's Ryzen 7040 series mobile processor lineup, and possible some of its upcoming Ryzen 7000G desktop processor models. It is the first chip from the AMD camp to feature an AI accelerator, besides up to 8 "Zen 4" CPU cores, and a large iGPU based on the latest RDNA3 graphics architecture, with up to 12 compute units, the latest display I/O and media acceleration capabilities. Over the course of its lifecycle, AMD realized that it can't use the nearly 200 mm² silicon built on the expensive 4 nm node to power lower-end processor SKUs, and so developed the smaller 137 mm² "Phoenix 2" silicon that lacks the AI accelerator, has a smaller iGPU with just 4 compute units, and a unique hybrid CPU with 2 "Zen 4" and 4 "Zen 4c" cores. We're now hearing that the company is designing even more derivatives.

The PCI ID Repository discovered two new IDs believed to reference the iGPU models of "Phoenix 3" and "Phoenix 4" chips. At this point we have no clue what the two chips could be, and what the mixture of their CPU, iGPU, and AI accelerator components could be, especially given that AMD is able to carve out Ryzen 3 SKUs from "Phoenix 2." We speculate that "Phoenix 3" and "Phoenix 4" could reference rebranding such as "Escher," although it could even be entirely new chips with different combinations of "Zen 4" and "Zen 4c" cores.

We're excited to share that Framework Laptop 16 made it into TIME's Best Inventions of 2023! This is our second product winning this award, with the original Framework Laptop making it onto the cover in 2021. Dave2D also got an early hands-on with a DVT2 engineering sample over the weekend and was surprised by the refinement of the design. This was a random development unit, and the final product has further improvement on mechanical fit and finish.

We know that the many of you who have placed pre-orders are eager to get your hands on the product. We're coming up to the end of the DVT2 phase, which is the final engineering phase of our product development process. The Framework engineering and supply chain teams are heads down now on engineering validation, completing firmware development, and readying manufacturing. This is by far the most complex product we've built, both from a design and an operational perspective, and we're putting everything we have into getting it right. We've made dozens of small mechanical and electrical changes over the last couple of months, and we'll be sharing some highlights on these over the coming weeks along with more detail on the schedule for mass production.

The first reviews of Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series) are live, and the results are everything we hoped for when we kicked off the product. Reviewers called out the massive jump in graphics performance, increases in battery life, and improvements in multi-core workloads. The integrated graphics capabilities are especially astounding, putting a wide range of recent game titles within reach in a thin, light, portable system. Check out some of what reviewers have to say:

"It immediately jumps to my number one recommendation for software developers looking for a small and portable laptop. But, given how insanely good this laptop is, I'd also strongly recommend those looking for a laptop for school or home or office use, to really consider this one."—JustJosh

We continue to be on track to start shipments before the end of the month on the new Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series). Last week we shared that SMT (Mainboard production) had started, and this week we've begun final assembly of laptops. We also pulled some early units to send out to press reviewers to make sure that you can see exactly where we've landed on performance and battery life.

We have another happy bit of news to share with you: our Lead System Architect Kieran was able to implement a firmware solution to reduce power consumption when using HDMI and DP Expansion Cards on the back two slots. The only remaining power issue is with USB-A Expansion Cards on the back slots, which we are investigating a future USB-A Expansion Card hardware revision to resolve.

A die-shot of AMD's 4 nm "Phoenix 2" monolithic APU emerged over the weekend—possibly the first example of a Team Red hybrid core processor, utilizing a combination of bog standard Zen 4 cores as well as "compacted" Zen 4c units. Phoenix 2 has been hiding in plain sight it seems, within Ryzen Z1 series APUs—that have much in common with mobile/laptop-oriented 7040U products. David Huang has posted an analysis of a Ryzen Z1 APU via his review as posted on Zhuanlan, where he investigates the intriguing combination of Zen 4 and Zen 4c cores.

As interpreted/translated by Tom's Hardware: "HWiNFO, a system information, monitoring, and diagnostics utility, confirms that the Ryzen Z1, codenamed Phoenix 2, is on the PHX2-A0 stepping. It differs from AMD's Ryzen 7040U series (Phoenix) with the PHX-A1 stepping. The Ryzen Z1 has been rumored to be a clone of the Ryzen 5 7540U for a long time now." Laptops housing the latter APU are reported to have reached retail markets in certain territories, while the Ryzen Z1 (non-Extreme) SoC has not debuted in any new devices. A cheaper ASUS ROG Ally is expected to arrive in the near future with the lesser chip.

The 4 nm "Phoenix 2" monolithic APU silicon powering the lower end of AMD's Ryzen 7040-series mobile processors, could very well be the company's first hybrid core processor, even though the company doesn't advertise it as such. We first caught whiff of "Phoenix 2" back in July, when it was described as being a physically smaller chip than the regular "Phoenix." It was known to have just 6 CPU cores, and a smaller iGPU with 4 RDNA3 compute units; in comparison to the 8 CPU cores and 12 compute units of the "Phoenix" silicon. At the time a lack of 2 CPU cores and 8 CUs were known to be behind the significant reduction in die size from 178 mm² to 137 mm², but it turns out that there's a lot more to "Phoenix 2."

A die shot of "Phoenix 2" emerged on Chinese social media platform QQ, which reveals two distinct kinds of CPU cores. There are six cores in all, but two of them appear larger than the other four. The obvious inference here, is that the larger cores are "Zen 4," and the smaller ones are the compacted "Zen 4c." The "Zen 4c" core has the same core machinery as "Zen 4," albeit it is re-arranged to favor lower area on the die. The trade-off here is that the "Zen 4c" core operates at lower voltages and lower clock-speeds than the regular "Zen 4" cores. At the same clock speeds, both kinds of cores have an identical IPC. The two also have an identical ISA, so any software threads migrating between the cores will not encounter runtime errors. Unlike Intel Thread Director, AMD can use a less sophisticated software-based solution to ensure that the right kind of workload is allocated to the right kind of cores, and prevent undesirable migration between the two kinds of cores. Unlike the hardware-based Thread Director, AMD's solution can be continually updated.

ASRock Industrial releases the 4X4 BOX 7040 Series Mini PCs powered by AMD Ryzen 7040U Series APUs, featuring up to 8 "Zen 4" cores and 16 threads. With the new AMD Ryzen AI, the first AI engine for an x86 platform, and support of dual-channel DDR5 5600 MHz memory up to 64 GB, the new Series sprint ahead in speed, performance, and AI capability, while guaranteeing extended runtime. The 4X4 BOX 7040 Series comes with enriched I/O connectivity in a compact appearance, enabling 4K quad-display outputs, five USB ports with two USB4, dual storage, and dual LAN up to 2.5G, Wi-Fi 6E. The faster performance with AI engine and longer runtime bring about productivity boost and next-level experience in content creation, gaming, entertainment, commerce, and many other AIoT applications.

Powered by AMD Ryzen 7040U Series APU (Ryzen 7 7840U/Ryzen 5 7640U), ASRock Industrial's 4X4 BOX 7040 Series contain selections: 4X4 BOX-7840U and 4X4 BOX-7640U. Featuring 4 nm "Zen 4" architecture with up to 8 cores and 16 threads, and enhanced dual-channel DDR5 5600 MHz SO-DIMM memory up to 64 GB, the Series guarantee faster productivity, content creation, and gaming with extended runtime. Moreover, with built-in AMD Ryzen AI - the pioneer of dedicated AI hardware in an X86 processor, the 4X4 BOX 7040 Series usher in advanced potentials in power, efficiency, and intuition for the future AI working world. This integration transforms the 4X4 BOX 7040 Series into a reliable personal virtual assistant, propelling dynamic AI applications, enhancing video conferencing, and delivering AI-inspired visuals.

SolidRun has announced the world's first rugged system design that combines 8-core AMD Ryzen 7040 series processors with multiple Hailo-8 AI accelerators to create its Bedrock R7000 Edge AI for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. This new member in SolidRun's Bedrock family of fanless modular industrial PCs is specifically designed to meet demanding vision-based situational awareness in harsh environments.

The new system integrates with the AMD Ryzen 7840HS processor, a state-of-the-art 4 nm APU with 8C/16T Zen 4 CPU and integrated RDNA 3 Radeon 780M GPU. The 20 native PCIe Gen 4 lanes and up to three Hailo-8 AI accelerators can be fully utilized together with NVMe Gen4x4 storage, dual 2.5 Gbit Ethernet and 4x4K displays. The CPU and all devices are passively cooled by the innovative fanless cooling system of the Bedrock R7000 in an industrial temperature range of -40°C to 85°C.

AYANEO, an Asian manufacturer known for its mobile handhelds, has introduced a new device, the AYANEO Kun. The Kun is powered by the latest AMD Ryzen 7 7840U mobile processor from the Ryzen 7040 series. This SoC includes eight Zen 4 cores and an integrated graphics unit based on the RDNA 3 architecture with 12 compute units. The console's dimensions stand at 312 x 133 x 21.9 mm, making it slightly wider but slimmer than ASUS's ROG Ally, with the exact weight yet to be disclosed. Kun's battery capacity is rated for 75Wh, as compared to other handhelds' 40 Wh, potentially indicating a longer battery life.

The AYANEO Kun's other notable features include its 8.4-inch display with an IPS panel and resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels. For controls, the device utilizes a D-Pad and two Hall sensor-equipped joysticks for gaming. The shoulder buttons also employ Hall sensor technology. There are touchpads on either side of the display, along with other function keys and the A/B/X/Y keys. For the first time, AYANEO has integrated buttons at the back of the device, offering customizable functions. The device provides two Type-C (likely USB4), one USB Type-A, and one 3.5 mm jack connection. More comprehensive technical details, model variants, and pricing information are to be released during the official unveiling of the AYANEO Kun scheduled for August.

Intel decided to drop the relatively new AVX-512 instruction set for laptop/mobile platforms when it was discovered that it would not work in conjunction with their E-core designs. Alder Lake was the last generation to (semi) support these sets thanks to P-cores agreeing to play nice, albeit with the efficiency side of proceedings disabled (via BIOS settings). Intel chose to fuse off AVX-512 support in production circa early 2022, with AMD picking up the slack soon after and working on the integration of AVX-512 into Zen 4 CPU architecture. The Ryzen 7040 series is the only current generation mobile platform that offers AVX-512 support. Phoronix decided to benchmark a Ryzen 7 7840U against older Intel i7-1165G7 (Tiger Lake) and i7-1065G7 (Ice Lake) SoCs in AVX-512-based workloads.

Team Red's debut foray into AVX-512 was surprisingly performant according to Phoronix's test results—the Ryzen 7 7840U did very well for itself. It outperformed the 1165G7 by 46%, and the older 1065G7 by an impressive 63%. The Ryzen 7 APU was found to attain the highest performance gain with AVX-512 enabled—a 54% performance margin over operating with AVX-512 disabled. In comparison Phoronix found that: "the i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake impact came in at 34% with these AVX-512-heavy benchmarks or 35% with the i7-1065G7 Ice Lake SoC for that generation where AVX-512 on Intel laptops became common."

AMD's laptop-oriented Ryzen 7040 series of Zen 4 processors APUs—based on 4 nm "Phoenix" monolithic silicon—have been slow to hit the market, but folks have had plenty of time to study spec sheets and press material. The presence of similar-ish 7040HS and 7040H product assignments (also sharing nearly identical specifications) has caused some confusion within the PC hardware community. Team Red has finally got round to explaining the significance of their -HS and -H identifiers—product pages were updated with new information this month, showing that the Ryzen 7040H series exists as a Chinese market exclusive. NA, EMEA, APJ, LATAM regions will be getting the closely related Ryzen 7040HS lineup instead. ASUS, Lenovo, and Machenike are set to launch new laptop models in China that will feature Ryzen 7040H APUs—VideoCardz found it interesting that "some of them will not have discrete graphics and will have a higher TDP of 65 W".

AMD today launched its Ryzen 7040HS line of mobile processors targeting consumer notebooks of conventional thickness and portability, which AMD considers thin-and-light. This class of devices is positioned between ultraportable notebooks, and gaming notebooks or portable workstations. AMD already powers several segments of gaming notebooks and portable workstations with its Ryzen 7045HX series "Dragon Range" mobile processors, with CPU core counts ranging between 6 and 16; as well as the ultraportable segment with the Ryzen 7040U series; but while the 7045 series have their TDP rated in the 45 W to 65 W range, and the Ryzen 7040U in the 15 W to 28 W range, the company was lacking a current-generation processor lineup in the 35 W to 54 W segment, which the company is filling up with today's Ryzen 7040HS series launch.

The Ryzen 7040HS series processors are based on the 4 nm "Phoenix" monolithic silicon, just like the 7040U series, and is based on a combination of "Zen 4" microarchitecture for its CPU, RDNA3 graphics architecture for its iGPU, and the new XDNA architecture for its Ryzen AI on-chip accelerator. Physically, the "Phoenix" silicon features an 8-core/16-thread "Zen 4" CPU. Each core has 1 MB of dedicated L2 cache, and a 16 MB L3 cache is shared among the 8 cores. The iGPU features 12 RDNA3 compute units, which amount to 768 stream processors, along with 24 AI Accelerators (specific to the RDNA3 architecture); 24 Ray Accelerators, 48 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. The iGPU meets the full DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements. The Ryzen AI XDNA accelerator features 20 AI acceleration tiles, each with local memory.