AMD Announces Ryzen Pro 8000 CPUs With Improved AI Performance

The Ryzen 8000 Pro chips for desktops and mobile devices are launching today. AMD promises improved AI performance for business users thanks to a newly added neural processing unit (NPU). The company directly targets Intel with this launch, as business users have always heavily favored Intel's processors. However, AMD says its solution is superior in performance and efficiency, even when compared with Intel's newest Meteor Lake chips.

The company is launching two new chip families today: the Ryzen 8000 Pro for desktops and the Ryzen Pro 8040 series for mobile users. AMD has added its NPU to both chip families (for the high-end chips), which it says will give business users better on-device AI performance. This is apparently a crucial new requirement for this class of machines, as companies don't want to use the cloud for AI due to privacy concerns. Using AI in this scenario includes chatbots, image generators, and office apps.

AMD has rebranded its Pro CPUs by adding the letters AI to the name; a harbinger of what's to come in 2024. Credit: AMD

Although both families are still Zen 4 CPUs, AMD has upgraded them from the 7000-series process of TSMC 5nm to TSMC 4nm, according to PCMag. It has also changed the name to Ryzen AI Pro versus Ryzen Pro for its predecessors. AMD is launching eight new mobile and desktop processors, and AMD says it'll help businesses safely deploy AI to its road warriors and desktop jockeys alike with better performance and efficiency than what Intel (and Apple) are offering.

Ryzen AI Pro for desktop tops out at 8-core, 16-thread processor with Radeon 780M graphics. Credit: AMD

Since these chips target businesses, they're all midrange offerings, with the mobile chips topping out at 45W and the desktop chips landing at 45W-65W. All of the mobile chips aside from the low-end model offer an NPU, though, while four of the eight desktop chips have an NPU. AMD says they allow for better performance in AI tasks and AI-enabled applications such as Microsoft Teams.

Overall, this is another salvo in the long-simmering "AI PC" battle. AMD and Intel are ramping up their efforts in this space and have begun focusing much more on AI performance instead of traditional benchmarks to show a chip's performance. However, this could be an important metric for business users as companies are now looking to run AI applications on their employees' machines. AMD says these chips will go into pre-made computers from companies like Lenovo and HP starting in Q2, so right now essentially.