AMD unveils Ryzen Pro 8000 series chips with built in NPUs for desktop and mobile

Following the launch of AMD’s first NPU-equipped processors, the Ryzen 8000G series from January, the company is expanding its portfolio with Ryzen Pro 8000 models that also feature AI acceleration hardware.

These are the AMD Ryzen Pro 8000 chips for desktop and Ryzen Pro 8040 for mobile. Additionally, there are Pro variants of the 8000G chips from earlier this year. What difference does that make?

The Pro chips have additional functionality that is beneficial or even required for professional use. This includes the Microsoft Pluton for encryption and additional memory protection, better ECC support, Secure Encrypted Virtualization, remote management features and so on.

The new Pro 8000 series offers up to 39 TOPS of AI processing power on desktop and up to 16 TOPS on mobile (vs. 34 and 11 TOPS on 14th Gen Intels). This is on low power chips with TDPs topping out at 45 to 65W watts.

The new series is fabbed on TSMC’s 4nm node, which offers improved efficiency compared to the older 5nm node that was used in the Ryzen 7000 series. The processors use Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 graphics. Note that some of the lower end models lack the Ryzen AI feature.

The NPUs will accelerate a variety of tasks – from summarizing emails and composing a response, to powering voice assistants and enhancing images and videos. Such tasks can be handled by a GPU, of course, but NPUs use less power to do the same work.

Lenovo and HP will be introducing laptops iwht Ryzen Pro 8040 and 8000 series processors, along with mobile workstations and desktops. Microsoft will leverage the NPU for its Copilot feature.

Source