Published in PC Hardware

AMD announce delays and Intel abandons Thunder Bay

by on20 March 2023


Bad week for dropping the ball

Intel and AMD dropped the ball on some key products. AMD said it was postponing this month's launch of the 7040HS series to April, and Chipzilla abandoned its Thunder Bay niche accelerator.

For those who came in late, AMD's Ryzen 7040HS series (codenamed Phoenix) and the recently released 7045HX series were based on Zen 4 and use TSMC's N4 node. The HS series features a big die that combines an RDNA3 GPU with up to eight cores, and the HX series uses a chiplet design ported from the desktop series with only a basic integrated RDNA2 GPU but up to 16 cores.

ModelCores / ThreadsBase / Boost ClockL2 + L3 CacheGPU CUscTDP
R9 7940HS 8 / 16 4.0 / 5.2 GHz 24 MB 12 35-54 W
R7 7840HS 8 / 16 3.8 / 5.1 GHz 24 MB 12 35-54 W
R5 7640HS 6 / 12 4.3 / 5.0 GHz 22 MB 8 35-54 W

 

Late on Friday, AMD announced that the 7040HS series had been delayed by a month to iron out some bugs. "We now expect our OEM partners to launch the first notebooks powered by Ryzen 7040HS series processors in April," AMD said in a press release.

There are three models in the HS series: the R9 7940HS and R7 7840HS with eight cores each and the R5 7640HS with six cores. All three have roughly 5 GHz boost clocks and target a 35-54 W power bracket. The CPUs also come equipped with dedicated AI accelerators, and modest integrated RDNA3 GPUs clocked just under 3 GHz, intended to compete with the GTX 1650.

Intel started submitting patches to the Linux kernel last week that removed support for the Thunder Bay SoC. Intel said that the product was cancelled, and there were no end customers or users."

Thunder Bay was the codename of an SoC that Intel first referenced in its submissions to the Linux kernel in 2021. Rumours said it combined Movidius VPUs (visual processing units) with Xeon cores, but its now-removed drivers revealed that it had Arm A53 cores instead.

Intel probably hasn't abandoned its plans to develop accelerators like Thunder Bay but has paused them as part of its recent efforts to cut costs.

 

Last modified on 20 March 2023
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