AMD unveils AI-powered Ryzen PRO 8040 and 8000 Series processors for laptops and desktops

AMD has announced the new AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series processors for business laptops and mobile workstations and the new AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series desktop processors for professionals. Designed for the age of the AI PC, it's the first set of PRO chips from AMD with built-in NPUs for AI workloads.

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AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series for laptops, image credit: AMD.

Like other 8000-series 'Hawk Point' and 'Phoenix' products, these are built on the tried-and-true Zen 4 architecture that has been powering Ryzen for a few years (we have to wait a bit longer until we see Zen 5). They have the bonus of AI acceleration and onboard RDNA graphics. These are similar to previous client-facing chips that launched earlier this year, with additional tweaks and services to suit the professional market.

In fact, the addition of AI hardware, the AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series for laptops and the AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series of desktop processors for workstations, have made AMD the first company to offer professional CPUs with AI NPUs for both environments. Intel has yet to launch a desktop CPU with a built-in NPU.

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AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series of desktop processors for workstations, image credit: AMD.

AMD's XDNA engine powers the NPU at the heart of these new processors. AMD touts up to 16 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) of NPU performance, notably higher than Intel's top Core Ultra chip, which tops out at 11 TOPS. Overall system AI performance, which factors in the GPU, brings this figure up to 39 TOPS for the new Ryzen chips - again, higher than Intel's 34 TOPS.

Interestingly, neither AMD nor Intel currently offers a chip capable of meeting Microsoft's AI PC requirement of 45 TOPs, which it outlined earlier in the year. So, we'll have to wait for next-gen chips from both companies for chips capable of running AI models and tools like Microsoft's Copilot locally. Still, these new Ryzen chips can run AI workloads.

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AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 8945HS compared to Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, image credit: AMD.

"AMD delivers the broadest portfolio of AI technologies to address the needs of the modern business. As we expand our AI PC leadership, we are bringing more power and efficiency to a wide array of desktops and mobile PCs," said Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Group at AMD. "Our latest PRO series processors set a new standard for premium computing experiences and help businesses deploy AI capabilities across their PCs with leadership performance and security."

The top-of-the-line mobile AMD Ryzen 9 PRO 8945HS is pretty impressive. It comes equipped with eight cores, 16 threads, 24MB of cache, and integrated Radeon 780M graphics, which is enough to handle video encoding, rendering, and other media tasks.

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AMD Ryzen 8700G processor compared to Intel's Core i7 14700 processor at a maximum of 65W, image credit: AMD.

The top-of-the-line desktop variant is the AMD Ryzen 8700G processor, which also comes equipped with eight cores, 16 threads, 24MB of cache, and integrated Radeon 780M graphics. AMD claims it delivers 19% better performance than Intel's Core i7 14700 processor at a maximum of 65W, using Geekbench, Passmark, and 3DMark tests.

For a full breakdown of the different models and specs, head here.

• Read more: AMD may release its next-gen Zen 5 desktop processors very soon
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• Read more: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU tested: Zen 5 chip is 46% faster in Cinebench R24 than Ryzen 9 7950X
• Read more: MSI's new AGESA update adds support for AMD's next-gen Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs