There's been lots of great new hardware this year, from gaming CPUs to awesome SSDs and outstanding OLED monitors. Equally, there's been a fair amount of disappointment, especially in the GPU sector. But for me, there's one piece of PC tech that's stood out from the rest. It doesn't boast jaw-dropping specifications nor does any one task better than anything else; you can't even buy it and put it into your PC. And yet, I think the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U is by far the best piece of hardware that's come to market this year.
It's not even AMD's most powerful or advanced laptop processor, as it sits squarely in the middle of the mobile Ryzen 7000 series, codenamed Phoenix. The 7840U eschews the multiple chiplets the top-tier mobile chips and most of the desktop Ryzen range use. It's a monolithic design (just one block of silicon), around 178 square millimetres in area.
