New AMD Ryzen Pro 8000 Series Processors Will Power AI PCs
Photo: AMD
AMD is announcing a new series of Ryzen Pro chips for AI PCs, meant to power desktops and laptops the company says will need to run artificial intelligence tasks locally rather than over the internet.
The Ryzen Pro chips, launching as the 8000 series in desktop and the 8040 series in laptops, will feature as many as 8-cores and 16-threads, running at up to 5.2 GHz for desktop and laptop PCs. The chips integrate AMD's Ryzen AI technology, which includes a built-in CPU, GPU and neural processing unit (or NPU), meant for running local AI. As a result of these technologies, AMD said its chips can perform on-device AI-related tasks up to 72% faster, and do it at 84% less power than Intel's competing Core Ultra processors.
These new chips also support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 and feature 16 dedicated NPU TOPS (Trillions or Tera Operations per Second) in both the desktop and mobile chips, vs. up to 11 TOPS in Intel's latest Core Ultra chips.
AMD's new Ryzen Pro chips are the latest in a wave of AI PCs, or computers designed to perform the increasingly complex AI-related tasks being built into apps, video games and chatbots. Microsoft has declared 2024 "the year of the AI PC," topped by the new Copilot key it's adding to PC keyboards, marking the first major change since the Windows key was added nearly 30 years ago. Meanwhile, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have been announcing more AI-capable chips across their product lines to power these devices.
For its Ryzen Pro series of chips, AMD said it has partnered with PC makers Lenovo and HP for major commercial sales, including the HP EliteBook G11 and ZBook G11 laptops, as well as its HP Elite Small Form Factor G9 desktops. Lenovo meanwhile will offer Ryzen Pro in its ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptops and TinkCentre M75-series desktops.
AMD also said it's working with more than 150 companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Unity, Blender and Tencent to ensure their software works well with its newest chips.
Next-gen tech
Part of how AMD has been able to achieve its performance gains and power efficiency has been because of the company's Zen 4 CPU designs, which were first released for consumers last year, married with RDNA 3 GPU graphics and the company's new XDNA NPU ("neural processing unit").
The newest Ryzen Pro chips are made using a 4 nm manufacturing process, which in theory packs more transistors into the chip than Intel's competing 7 nm process, though there's a lot of debate about the exact details.
AMD said its Ryzen Pro chips will also have many security features similar to Intel's competing business-focused chips. AMD said it also added Microsoft Pluton security cryptography processor, which promises chip-to-cloud protection, to its desktops for the first time. AMD has offered Pluton on its laptops for the past few years.
Local AI will become a bigger and bigger topic in later 2024 and into 2025, thanks to LLM models like Llama 2 and Mistral AI than can be downloaded and run directly on a PC (rival NVIDIA has a platform called ChatRTX that does just that), as long as the PC in question has the right hardware to handle these power-intensive tasks.
Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. His stories and their insights have moved markets, changed how companies see themselves and given readers a unique view into how some of the world’s most powerful brands operate. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.