AMD Launches Ryzen PRO 7040 Line of Processors for Commercial Notebooks
AMD has announced the release of its Ryzen PRO 7040 line of processors for commercial notebooks. These notebooks are purchased in large quantities by businesses or government organizations to be distributed to their employees. The key difference between commercial and consumer notebooks is the built-in security and remote-management features that allow organizations to remotely handle user credentials, securely store company data, and remotely deploy software updates. AMD's launch includes Ryzen PRO 7040 series mobile processors for both the 15 W to 28 W ultraportable and 35 W to 55 W thin-and-light commercial notebook form-factors.
Features of Ryzen PRO 7040 Series Processors
The Ryzen PRO 7040 series processors feature the 4 nm "Phoenix" silicon, which combines the "Zen 4" microarchitecture for the CPU, with RDNA3 graphics architecture for the iGPU, and introduces the Ryzen AI on-die accelerator based on the Xilinx-designed XDNA architecture to the commercial notebook segment. The silicon physically features an 8-core/16-thread "Zen 4" CPU, with several processor models boosting to the 5.00 GHz-mark. The iGPU meets full DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements and features 12 RDNA3 compute units, which work out to 768 dual issue-rate stream processors, 24 AI Accelerators, and 12 Ray Accelerators, besides 48 TMUs and industry-leading 32 ROPs. AMD is backing the iGPU on these processors with AMD Software PRO, which come with superior support from AMD and special packages for remote deployment by organizations. Ryzen AI is a comprehensive hardware accelerator for AI workloads, with a peak performance of 10 TOP/s.
AMD's Bet on On-Device AI Acceleration
AMD is betting on software that requires on-device AI acceleration as opposed to cloud-based AI workload computing. The Ryzen AI accelerator uses 20 AI Engine tiles, along with localized memory, and adaptive interconnect that links each AIE tile to several other tiles. There are several applications for AI relevant to the commercial computing space, including image processing and manipulation, GPTs such as Microsoft Office Co-pilot, and AI-based data-analytics, all without data leaving the device.
Performance and Design Wins
AMD claims that the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U provides superior performance to the Apple M2 Pro (10-core) powering certain MacBook Pro models, while the Ryzen 9 PRO 7940HS is shown beating the Intel Core i9-13900H in a variety of business and productivity benchmarks. AMD has scored several commercial notebook design wins with Lenovo and HP for their 2023 portfolios.
