AMD announced its third-generation Ryzen Pro processors for business laptops on Thursday, taking the AI power of its Ryzen AI 300 consumer processors and applying them to the business world.
AMD launched three very similar members of its Ryzen AI Pro 300 family, with core counts ranging from eight to 12 cores. They’ll launch later in October.
AMD launched its Ryzen AI 300 laptop processor for consumers earlier this year, and the Ryzen AI Pro is basically that chip with some additional security technologies layered on top. The AI 300 ushered AMD’s new Zen 5 architecture into the market, with more cores and more powerful RDNA 3.5 graphics. The chip also includes AMD’s XDNA 2 NPU architecture, which more than doubles the available TOPS of the previous Ryzen Pro 8040 series from 16 to 50 to 55 TOPS, depending on the model.
Otherwise, the Ryzen AI 300 Pro is similar to the 8040 in that it still uses the same 4nm process technology and consumes the same amount of power or between 15 to 54 watts. The new chips include the Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 375, the Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370, and the Ryzen AI 7 HX Pro 360.
AMD
AMD is banking fairly heavily on AI as a selling point, noting that the Ryzen AI Pro 300 series is currently the only X86 business processor available with the available TOPS to meet the 40-TOPS threshold to meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC standard. Intel has yet to announce a vPro business version of its Lunar Lake processor, which also meets the TOPS standard. Qualcomm, of course, was first to market with its AI-powered Windows on Arm Snapdragon X Elite chip, too. Like Intel, however, AMD will require an update from Microsoft to enable its AI capabilities.
AMD’s new security features include Cloud Bare Metal Recovery, which helps recover the system via the cloud, AMD Device Identity, which guarantees authentic AMD chips for traceability across the supply chain, and a Watch Dog Timer function, which helps identify and recover processes that “hang” or stall out.
AMD is still a minority player in the PC notebook space, but it has steadily increased share over the past year. A year ago, AMD held a 16.5 percent unit market share of all notebook processors, but it’s now just above 20 percent as of the second quarter, according to Mercury Research. AMD said it will ship more than 100 different notebook models with its partners this year that use the Ryzen AI Pro, including HP and Lenovo.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.