AMD

Phoenix APU Availability: 35-45W “HS” April 30, 15-28W “U” May

APU Phoenix, which AMD announced at the beginning of the year at CES, has seen a slide of about a month. The first line of models, the 35-45W “HS”, was not released in March as AMD originally anticipated, but slipped to the end of April. The official reasons for the delay are not known (respectively there was a vague mention of a delay in the preparation of the platform) and there are various speculations. If we take into account the fact that it is a product combining, from AMD’s point of view, a new process (4nm TSMC), a new CPU architecture (Zen 4), a new GPU architecture (RDNA 3) and a new Xillinx IP (XDNA), a month-long delay is not such a tragedy. Especially at a time when the demand for laptops is more or less at freezing point.

According to leaker Golden Pig Upgrade, laptops with Phoenix-HS (35W models with the possibility of TDP regulation to 45W+) were supposed to appear on sale at the very end of April. The more positive news is that Phoenix-U (15-28W models for light and thin notebooks) will no longer affect this postponement and could appear during May, i.e. before Computex.

Mobile APU Phoenix you can tell by the Ryzen 7×40 model marking (HS or U). If there is a five at the end instead of a zero, it is a chiplet processor Dragon Rangealso with kernels Zen 4, but with a 5nm process and significantly lower performance integrated graphics (more for imaging and video). On the other hand, the integrated graphics APU Phoenix with performance estimated to be 20-30% above last year’s APU Rembrandt (which brought a huge shift in this direction), achieves at least in some tests a performance comparable to the former GeForce GTX Titan. Another big asset is the long battery life, which reaches up to ~30 hours when playing video on the reference platform.

Although Phoenix picked up some delay, it doesn’t look like that should mean it won’t be on the market for a year. It is rumored to be its successor, a 3nm APU Strix Point with cores Zen 5from the beginning it is not aiming for the first quarter (of 2024), but at least for the second, so Phoenix it will be on the market for at least a year. The question is whether there will be a refresh – slower 4nm versions are currently being prepared for lower price ranges Phoenixso the classic mobile refreshes that AMD uses in the mobile segment for lower price segments may be a little behind next year.

Source: Diit