AMD delays Ryzen 7040HS series, Intel cancels Thunder Bay SoC
What happened now? This week, Intel and AMD suffered losses. Team Red lost their schedule at the last minute and were forced to delay this month’s 7040HS series launch to April. Team Blue said goodbye to a niche accelerator that they never managed to launch – RIP Thunder Bay.
Announced at CES 2023, AMD’s Ryzen 7040HS series (codenamed Phoenix) and the recently launched 7045HX series are based on Zen 4 and use the TSMC N4 node, but that’s where the similarities end. The HS series uses a monolithic die that combines an RDNA3 GPU with up to eight cores, while the HX series uses a chipset design carried over from the desktop series with only a basic integrated RDNA2 GPU but up to 16 cores.
Late Friday night, AMD announced that the 7040HS series deferred for a month to iron out the mistakes. “We now expect our OEM partners to release the first laptops based on the Ryzen 7040HS series processors in April,” Team Red said in a press release.
Phoenix
| Model | Cores/Threads | Base/boost clock | L2 + L3 cache | GPU CU | cTDP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| R9 7940HS | 8/16 | 4.0/5.2 GHz | 24 MB | 12 | 35-54W |
| R77840HS | 8/16 | 3.8/5.1 GHz | 24 MB | 12 | 35-54W |
| R5 7640XS | 6/12 | 4.3/5.0 GHz | 22 MB | 8 | 35-54W |
The HS series includes three models: R9 7940HS and R7 7840HS with eight cores each and R5 7640HS with six cores. All three are clocked at approximately 5GHz and are rated at 35-54W. The CPUs are also equipped with dedicated AI accelerators and humble RDNA3 integrated GPUs clocked at just under 3GHz, designed to compete with the GTX 1650.
Thunder Bay
Last week, Intel began releasing patches to the Linux kernel removing support for the Thunder Bay SoC. Phoronix found explanation in a dismal patch note: “Product has been cancelled, but there are no end customers or users.”
Thunder Bay is the code name for the SoC that Intel first mentioned in their 2021 Linux kernel filings. Movidius VPU (visual processors) with Xeon cores, but its now removed drivers showed it had Arm A53 cores instead.
Don’t worry if the name Movidius makes you scratch your head. Intel acquired a company that makes artificial intelligence accelerators for IoT applications in 2016 and has phased out its brand. Since then, Intel has continued to silently release Movidius visual processors every couple of years, but has mostly integrated the technology into its other lines, including its 13th generation Core processors as an AI block.
Team Blue has likely not abandoned its plans to develop boosters like the Thunder Bay, but has put them on hold as part of their recent cost-cutting efforts.
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