The AMD Ryzen 7 8840HX and AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX differ significantly in their core CPU speeds and configuration. The Ryzen 7 8840HX operates at a CPU speed of 12 x 2.9 GHz, while the Ryzen 9 8940HX has a higher base speed of 16 x 2.4 GHz. Despite the Ryzen 9 having more cores, the Ryzen 7 has a higher per-core clock speed. The turbo clock speeds also show a small difference, with the Ryzen 9 reaching 5.3 GHz compared to the Ryzen 7's 5.1 GHz, providing slightly more potential boost performance for the Ryzen 9.
In terms of threads, the Ryzen 7 8840HX supports 24 threads, while the Ryzen 9 8940HX offers 32 threads, which can be beneficial for heavily multi-threaded tasks. Both processors have unlocked multipliers, giving users flexibility for overclocking. The L2 cache for the Ryzen 7 is 12 MB, compared to the Ryzen 9's 16 MB, and the L1 cache is 768 KB for the Ryzen 7 versus 1024 KB for the Ryzen 9.
The L3 cache is the same size at 64 MB for both processors, but the Ryzen 7 8840HX has a larger L3 cache per core at 5.33 MB, compared to the Ryzen 9 8940HX's 4 MB per core. Neither processor uses big.LITTLE technology, and the clock multiplier is higher for the Ryzen 7 at 29, compared to the Ryzen 9's 24. Overall, while both processors offer impressive performance, the Ryzen 9 has more threads and a slightly higher turbo clock speed, but the Ryzen 7 offers better per-core performance with a higher base clock speed and larger L3 cache per core.