AMD has announced its new processor portfolio Ryzen Pro. See the addition of the serie 8040 Hawk Point intended for business users, both on notebooks and workstations, together with the templates Ryzen 8000 APUs Phoenixdesigned for commercial desktop PCs.
The Ryzen Pro series represents an extension of the processor lines consumer from AMD, but with additional features designed to meet the specific needs of the workplace. Among these features, the integration of an NPU unit stands out (Neural Processing Unit) to supervise the processing related to theartificial intelligence (IA) directly in hardware.
The presence of NPU represents a significant step forward for AMD in the laptop and workstation market, enabling professionals to fully exploit the power of AI to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their businesses.
AMD Ryzen 8000 processors: the important step of integrating an NPU
One of the key features of the new chips from AMD is the presence of XNDA engine integrated, which powers the NPU and – according to the assessments of the engineers of the company led by Lisa Su – ensures superior performance compared to competitors.
The new AMD processors intended for the mobile market boast a power of 16 TOPS on the NPU side, exceeding – again according to AMD – the performance of the similar unit hosted in Intel Meteor Lake (stops at 11 TOPS).
TOPS stands for “Trillion Operations Per Second“: it is a unit of measurement used to also quantify the processing power of neural processing units (NPUs) or other devices that support AI-related workloads. Essentially, it indicates how many computational operations a unit can perform in one second. For example, if a drive has a power of 10 TOPS, that means it can perform 10 trillion operations every second.
AMD also claims to maintain an advantage in terms of too overall performance of the system, with 39 TOPS compared to Intel’s 34 TOPS: the value includes both the AI processing power of the CPU and that of the GPU.
The road to meeting the requirements set by Microsoft for AI PCs is still long
Importantly, despite the significant progress made by AMD and Intel in AI and hardware support for connected computing, none of either company’s current chips meet Microsoft’s stringent requirements for next-generation AI PCs. : they require an NPU side power of at least 45 TOPS.
Both AMD and Intel, however, have confirmed that their next generations of chips, Strix Point e Lunar Lakewill respect the indications set by the Redmond giant.
To fully exploit the potential ofIA in localeHowever, it is necessary to develop specially designed software solutions. In this context, partnerships with developers are of crucial importance and AMD has already initiated collaborations with over 150 ISVs (Independent Software Vendor) to develop AI-driven solutions during 2024.
Run i workload related to AI directly on their devices can help mitigate concerns related to data security and to privacyoffering significant benefits in latency, performance and battery life.
The performance of the new Ryzen Pro chips, according to AMD
Examining the results of the benchmark conducted by AMD technicians, it emerges that – for example – the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U offers an average 30% advantage over Intel’s Core Ultra 7 165U across a wide range of workloads. The Ryzen 9 Pro 8945HS for workstations also offers an advantage of 50% or more using specific AI applications.
As we reported at the beginning, AMD also presented Ryzen Pro APUs of the 8000 series for desktop PCs which are in great shape thanks to the combination of CPU Zen 4 and graphics engine RDNA 3. These APUs also integrate a motore NPU which further accelerates AI performance, allowing business users to benefit from the latest AI innovations directly on their desktop systems.
Another distinctive element of the Ryzen Pro series is the integration of technologies AMD Pro, which include advanced security, management and reliability features. These are innovations specifically designed to meet the needs of the corporate sector. Among these technologies, they stand out AMD Pro Security, AMD Pro Manageability e AMD Pro Business Readywhich guarantee high security, ease of management and stability of the systems.