It’s no secret that AMD has a new low-power laptop chip with potent integrated graphics. Companies like Asus, Aokzoe, and Ayaneo are sticking it — or its Z1 Extreme spinoff — into their handheld gaming PCs. But the AMD 7840U was originally designed for thin and powerful laptops, and the company’s finally beginning to share that story today.

AMD claims the new chip can give Apple a run for its money, besting the 2022 MacBook Air’s M2 processor in “application performance” by up to 75 percent and taking on the Intel Core i7-1360P by even more than that in both productivity and graphics, as you’ll see stated fairly vaguely in the charts below.

Gen on gen, AMD client PR manager Matthew Hurwitz tells me the chip offers up to a 24 percent “application performance” increase over the company’s 6850H chip.

AMD claims it can do all that while delivering “leadership efficiency for exceptional battery life,” but unfortunately, it’s not offering even the vaguest idea of what that battery life might be like. It’s possible the company doesn’t yet know: all these benchmarks were run on a reference board rather than a laptop. (Apple’s M2-powered laptops are reigning battery life champs, so it’s kind of important to know!)

That said, Hurwitz said we can expect more information about battery life and gaming FPS to be forthcoming, and AMD hasn’t been a slouch of late in the Windows realm. He says Framework (which recently announced its first AMD-powered laptop), Razer, Acer, HP, and Lenovo will use these chips, among others.

The AMD 7840U isn’t alone in the new 15- to 30-watt lineup of U-series parts. There will be Ryzen 9, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 3 series parts as well, which will feature three different tiers of graphics, too: the 12-core Radeon 780M, eight-core Radeon 760M, and four-core Radeon 740M.

All of these specs suggest the AMD Z1 handheld gaming part is likely a modified Ryzen 5 7540U, with a Radeon 740M iGPU.