AMD has just announced the upcoming arrival of its new series of processors, the Ryzen 8040. Designed for laptops, they promise high performance for video games and artificial intelligence.
The designer of AMD processors just revealed in broad terms the characteristics of its next series of chips for laptops, the Ryzen 8040. With an expected arrival on the market from the first quarter of 2024, these new processors should be quickly integrated into the products of many manufacturers, such as ‘Acer, Asus, Dell, Dell, Lenovo or Razer. As is the case for previous generation models, the Ryzen 5000, 6000 and 7000, these new mobile processors will undoubtedly also be used soon in certain desktop computers, and in particular mini PCs (Geekom, Beelink, Minisforum, etc. .), which have space constraints similar to laptops due to their compact format.
In terms of new features and improvements offered by the Ryzen 8040 series, AMD obviously promises significant gains in performance in demanding workloads, such as video games or 3D rendering, and also places great emphasis on the increased capabilities of its new processors in the field of artificial intelligence.
The new range of processors will a priori be available in nine different models, all designed under the Zen4 architecture, and ranging from a small Ryzen 3 8840U with 4 cores and 8 threads, up to the enormous Ryzen 9 8945HS embarking for its share 8 cores and 16 threads. In terms of operating frequency, the 8040 series will offer a range ranging from 3.0 Ghz base and 4.7 Ghz peak for the smallest model, and 4.0 Ghz base and 5.2 Ghz peak for the top of the range. range. Finally, the graphics part will be entrusted to iGPUs – integrated graphics processing units – in RDNA 3 architecture from the Radeon 700M series, ranging from the 740M to 780M model depending on the processor.
Technical characteristics that are, in short, quite classic and not really revolutionary. The real improvements and new features will rather be found in the optimization of the Zen4 and RDNA 3 architectures, on which AMD unfortunately does not provide detailed information, and in the presence of a new component dedicated to artificial intelligence, Ryzen AI NPU.
AMD Ryzen 8040: top performance and better energy efficiency
As with each new generation of processors and like all its competitors, AMD is not shy of flamboyant promises regarding the exceptional capabilities of its new products. On the program, performance superior to that of competitors by 64% in video editing, 37% in 3D rendering and 77% in video games, just that. These wonderful figures are obviously given for the Ryzen 9 8945HS, the most powerful model of the future range and undoubtedly the most expensive, compared to its direct competitor, the Core i9-13900H, Intel’s most powerful CPU in this range. Furthermore, the tests carried out to obtain these measurements are carried out under controlled and optimal conditions, and the real performance of the new chips will, as always, be very dependent on the quality of hardware and software integration that the PC manufacturers make.
Another aspect of the Ryzen 8040 series that AMD emphasizes is that of energy performance. A black spot for processors under x86 architecture, the subject has become a central technical and marketing issue in the strategy of chip designers since the irruption of Apple in this sector, with its M chips under ARM architecture which work real miracles in matter. For its new range, AMD therefore promises a significant improvement in the energy efficiency of its processors, and therefore in the autonomy of computers using its processors, through “innovative energy management functions”, without providing more explanations or numerical measurements on the subject.
AMD Ryzen 8040: more power for AI
As is the trend of the times, the capabilities intended for artificial intelligence within the Ryzen 8040 range are particularly highlighted by AMD. Some of the new processors – all except the 8440U and the 8540U – will in fact integrate the Ryzen AI NPU, a module supposed to offer 60% higher performance than the previous Ryzen 7040 series, with still the same reservations on this type of processor. measurements carried out in the laboratory and therefore far from real conditions of use.
As a reminder, an NPU, for Neural Processing Unit, is a component of the processor dedicated to calculations and specific operations of artificial neural networks, which are the logical systems on which the operation of artificial intelligence tools is based. Currently, automatic content generation programs, such as ChatGPT or DALL-E, perform their calculations on dedicated and extremely powerful computer servers. One of the major challenges of the moment for manufacturers of consumer computers is to allow these programs to run locally, on the user’s machine, in particular thanks to the integration of these famous NPUs into the processors. Just like Apple, it is on this path that AMD seems to be accelerating and concentrating its efforts for its generation of Ryzen 8040 processors.
To drive the point home and further mark its involvement in the development of artificial intelligence-based tools, AMD also announces that its software Ryzen AI becomes widely available to developers. It is both a set of development tools and a runtime environment, which allows you to design applications based on the machine learning and large language models, and take advantage of the Ryzen AI NPU integrated into the 8040 series processors. For example, computers with Ryzen AI will be able to move the execution of artificial intelligence models from the CPU to the NPU, in order to relieve the central processor and reduce its energy consumption. AMD also mentions some other fields of application for its Ryzen AI tool, such as gesture recognition, biometric authentication or accessibility functions.
The range of Ryzen 8040 processors therefore seems particularly promising, with a strong emphasis on power, energy efficiency and especially artificial intelligence. While waiting for the release of the first machines equipped with the famous chips, we must obviously keep a healthy distance from the fantastic promises of marketing, but the first quarter of 2024 is shaping up to be interesting in the world of portable PCs, whatever happens. .