AMD Ryzen 7 7840U Performance Benchmarks On Linux: Great Uplift For Zen 4 Laptops
For weeks and weeks I've been eager to see how well the new AMD Zen 4 based "Phoenix" laptop SoCs function and perform under Linux. Recently I finally found an interesting AMD Ryzen 7 7840U laptop to test and today have some initial Linux benchmarks to share from this Acer Swift Edge 16 laptop with Ryzen 7 7840U SoC and a 3.2K 120Hz OLED display, among other interesting specs.
The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U is the current top-tier Phoenix U-series laptop processor. This SoC features 8 cores / 16 threads, 3.3GHz base clock, up to a 5.1GHz boost clock, 16MB L3 cache, and a default TDP of 28 Watts with a cTDP of 15 to 30 Watts. The Ryzen 7 7840U features integrated Radeon 780M graphics with 12 CUs. The 7840U does feature AMD Ryzen AI functionality though this AI engine isn't currently exposed under Linux at least as far as upstream software support is concerned.
The Ryzen 7 7840U is effectively the successor to the Ryzen 7 (PRO) 6850U. This Phoenix series laptop processor has all of the common Zen 4 architecture elements including AVX-512. The Phoenix series are manufactured on a TSMC 4nm process.
Since AMD announced the Ryzen 7040 series laptop processors I've been very eager to see how well these new processors perform especially given the success in the desktop and server space of Zen 4. Unfortunately AMD doesn't actively engage with us over Linux laptop testing and the major OEMs/ODMs aren't actively engaging at large with the relatively small Linux niche especially from the PR side. Meanwhile the Linux laptop vendors currently are still relying on the Ryzen 6000 / 7030 series. So I've spent weeks scouring some interesting Phoenix laptop to buy in order to conduct Linux compatibility testing and benchmarking.
Ultimately I settled on the Acer Swift Edge 16. Many of the early Ryzen 7040 series laptops have featured NVIDIA GeForce RTX discrete graphics, which isn't of too much interest to many Phoronix readers that from the enthusiast/gamer angle tend to prefer Radeon (or Intel) graphics thanks to the fully open-source driver code. So it was a lot of waiting until finding a laptop in-stock with integrated graphics and other interesting specs. The Acer Swift Edge 16 became available in-stock last week and I went with it, which seems to be the first in-stock using the Ryzen 7 7840U. Also making this laptop interesting is its 16-inch 3.2K 120Hz OLED display that does support HDR.
The Acer Swift Edge 16 has 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD, at least under Windows is rated for a 8.5 hour battery life, and features a magnesium alloy chassis. This Ryzen 7 7840U laptop is currently shipping at $1299 USD. Unfortunately the memory is non-upgradeable beyond the soldered 16GB of RAM.
By default the Acer Swift Edge 16 ships with Windows 11 Home. Quickly after receiving this laptop it was onward to testing Linux. First up was using Ubuntu 23.04, which refreshingly booted without issue on this laptop. Booting the Ubuntu 23.04 ISO yielded working graphics acceleration, the integrated WiFi was working, the touchpad and keyboard were working, and the NVMe drive was properly detected. It was off to a great start!
But when rebooting to the newly-installed Ubuntu 23.04 is when the first problem arose... The screen went black upon booting the new installation after the Plymouth boot splash screen was over. Quite strange considering from the live ISO it booted up fine without issue to the GUI installer. And VT switching still was working for this laptop. After a lot of troubleshooting, it was a GNOME Wayland (Mutter) display problem / Wayland.... The ultimate cause yet to be figured out but likely due to some combination of the OLED/HDR panel. When switching to a VT and installing the KDE Plasma desktop, SDDM fired right on up and proceeded to work with the KDE Plasma desktop complete with graphics acceleration.
AMD Linux engineers hadn't encountered said issue with their test hardware and seems to be something specific to the Acer Swift Edge 16's panel. They did note though to ensure AMD Phoenix laptop users fetch their latest AMDGPU firmware files from linux-firmware.git as with some laptop panels there may be Panel Self Refresh (PSR) issues if using the older firmware. Unfortunately for my case it didn't help the GNOME issue so my testing has been under KDE Plasma thus far.
After that initial headache, the Linux experience has been relatively robust. But I've also hit some other graphical glitches with the Radeon RX 780M upon game testing... Partial frame-buffer compression / white-out areas of the display. It's possible these items may be resolved past Linux 6.4 / Mesa 23.1, but alas I've been hammering this laptop for only the past week. Thus for today's article is focusing only on the Ryzen 7 7840U Linux CPU performance and a follow-up article will dig more into the Radeon 780M graphics support and performance under Linux.
The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U for Linux benchmarking is also a great choice since it's this model that the Framework Laptop will be shipping later this year. The Ryzen 7 7840U is also set to be in the GPD Win Max 2 among other higher-end 2023 laptops.
Besides the mentioned graphics issues, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U has been working out well under Linux and it's sure been darn fast! Very exciting having Zen 4 in a laptop especially for those able to leverage AVX-512 or other heavy workloads from a laptop. Today's article has the Ubuntu 23.04 performance of the Acer Swift Edge 16 with Ryzen 7 7840U up against the prior generation Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U within a Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 (LENOVO 21CM0001US) and then an Intel Core i7 1280P Alder Lake within a MSI Prestige 14 (MSI MS-14C6). Unfortunately I don't have any newer Raptor Lake laptop for Linux testing.