AMD is intensifying its fight against Intel by announcing new business-focused PC chips designed to bring AI processing to laptops and desktops. On Tuesday, AMD introduced the Ryzen Pro 8040 series for notebooks and the Ryzen Pro 8000 series for commercial desktops. However, to set them apart from a typical refresh, both chip families contain a dedicated Neural Processing Unit to handle generative AI-focused workloads, whether that’s image generation or chatbot tech. It’s also why the company is branding both chip lines as Ryzen AI Pro. You can already access AI programs like ChatGPT or DALL-E on the internet. But AMD says businesses increasingly want to run generative AI tech locally on their own PCs, citing the privacy benefits.
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“A lot of things we are working on are really private. We don’t want to put [confidential] data on the internet,” AMD marketing manager Ronak Shah said during a press briefing.AMD’s dedicated AI processing can also run “productivity boosting” features on the PC to help employees work more efficiently, he added. Another important feature of the Ryzen Pro 8000 chips is the use of TSMC’s 4-nanometer manufacturing process to cram more transistors on the chips—an upgrade from the 5-nanometer process AMD has been using for the Ryzen 7000 series on desktops and mobile. But based on the specs, these business-focused chips aren’t designed for powerhouse PCs, but rather thin and light commercial products.
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On the laptop front, the Ryzen Pro 8040 series features eight processor models — all of which contain the Ryzen AI processing, except for the lowest tier, the Ryzen 5 Pro 8540U. The company is marketing the chips as strong performers, excelling at everyday productivity and multitasking while offering long battery life. The chips all run at a TDP ranging from 35 to 54 watts and 15 to 28 watts, suggesting they’re designed more for thin and light laptops. AMD’s benchmarks show the Ryzen Pro 8040 series mostly beating Intel’s own Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” chips across various CPU benchmarks, including running Microsoft Office programs and AI-based large language models.
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One test also showed AMD’s Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U processor outlasting Intel’s and Apple’s latest chips in a battery test involving Microsoft Teams.
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For business desktops, the AMD Ryzen Pro 8000 series will cover eight different chip models; the four lower-end models do not feature dedicated AI processing. The Ryzen Pro 8000 series also runs at lower power levels with the TDP ranging from 45 to 65 watts or merely 35 watts, or less than half of the consumer-focused Ryzen 7000 series.
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AMD only offered one benchmark, but it showed the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 8700G handily beating Intel’s Core i7-14700 chip, resulting in an average 19% performance increase.
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AMD didn’t give a specific launch date for the chips. The company plans on releasing the processors through PC makers, including Lenovo and HP, which include refreshing models in Lenovo’s ThinkPad and ThinkCentre lines. Stay tuned for our reviews.
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