In essence, the Ryzen 8040 series that AMD has just introduced has almost no significant difference compared to the previous Ryzen 7040, or we could say this is “old wine in a new bottle,” employing a rebranding tactic.
If you look into it, you will see that Ryzen 8040 “Hawk Point” and Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” differ only in their release years: 2023 and 2024, while the “internal content” remains the Zen 4 architecture. Naturally, most users find this hard to accept or simply dislike the idea, believing that Ryzen 8040 is a superior product to Ryzen 7040.
Renaming, rebranding, or “changing names” is nothing new in sales & marketing; it could be said that almost every manufacturing company does this. Of course, this approach is not inherently wrong if their products do not fundamentally require technological or quality innovation to satisfy customers. However, with tech products—specifically in the semiconductor sector—it is a bit different; we are less accepting when the truth is discovered.
That said, saying Ryzen 8040 is “exactly the same” as Ryzen 7040 is not entirely accurate. According to the company’s announcement at the Advancing AI event, the Hawk Point chip has 1.4 times higher AI computing capability than Phoenix. But from an average user’s perspective… most of us have no idea how to actually use AI on these chips. Not only that, benchmarking AI performance and demonstrating those numbers in a way that readers can understand remains a headache for many tech sites.
Looking at the cause, the reason for this “old wine in a new bottle” approach stems from the limited supply of 4 nm chips provided by TSMC. Therefore, even though they were launched in early 2023 (nearly a year ago), the supply of Phoenix chips remained quite scarce. It is only now that AMD has “gathered enough” Hawk Point chips to launch them once again. Consequently, in this announcement, AMD has up to 9 different Ryzen 8040 models, compared to only 3 Ryzen 7040 models from earlier this year.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean that Ryzen 8040 products are “bad” or “low quality.” They will still be fine if users are satisfied with a laptop using AMD’s latest Zen 4 architecture. But if you are expecting something entirely new and “the latest” in every aspect… well, perhaps we should wait for the next generation—Strix Point.
Source: Tinhte.vn
