AMD launches Ryzen 8040 Mobile with AI

AMD launches new laptop processors. The AMD Ryzen 8040 mobile phone doesn’t involve any architectural leaps, but it’s mainly making its way into the spotlight thanks to AI acceleration.

AMD introduces the Ryzen 8040. Anyone familiar with AMD’s strange naming conventions for Ryzen chips will immediately see from the name that we shouldn’t expect any major technological leaps forward from the new series of chips. The thousand in the series name has nothing to do with the node or the architecture of the CPUs, but only indicates the year of release. The number “7” means 2023, and “8” means 2024. Therefore, these new chips will be available in the first quarter of next year.

The ten is more important in the nomenclature: the “4” makes it clear that these new processors are built on the Zen 4 architecture, just like last year’s Ryzen 7040. In terms of CPU, we should not expect any major innovations compared to last year. AMD today launches an expanded lineup with four to eight cores and multi-threading, with the ability to configure TDPs of up to 15W on the low end. This makes the chips ideal for thin-to-thin laptops. The maximum clock frequency is in line with previous versions of Ryzen mobile.

Changes are also limited on the graphical side. The Radeon 780M chip is still the most powerful GPU chip available. It performs better than the competition’s integrated GPU, which AMD cheerfully compared at launch. Major improvements to the mobile Ryzen 8040 over the mobile Ryzen 7040 aren’t imminent either.

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Is there any news other than the launch year? Fortunately, the majority of newly announced processors come with an NPU chip. AMD fully opted to accelerate AI with the launch of the Ryzen Pro 7040 mobile six months ago, and is now expanding NPU integration to nearly the entire 8040 lineup. Current NPU in Ryzen 8040 – Hawk Point – He follows Phoenix-NPU in previous generation chips. The new NPU drives 39 TOPS (tensor operations per second), compared to the previous 33 TOPS.

AMD goes further and talks about AI-powered personal computers, powered by its processors. They have up to 1.6 times more AI computing power than previous models. “AI computing power” is an abstract concept that AMD is explaining. Already today, there are more than a hundred AI-powered experiences available for Windows PCs, accelerated by the NPUs in the 8040 series. AMD points to the individual functions, which mainly come from Adome and competitor Black Magic. For example, DaVnci Resolve has nineteen features that can take advantage of the NPU, while Photoshop has 23, provided you count all the neural filter variations separately.

AMD also emphasizes how the chips can easily support different AI models. Developers can run models trained in frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow almost instantly on Ryzen AI (NPU)-equipped laptops. The ONNX runtime supports enhanced models available via Hugging Face. Developers can get started and create AI-based features for voice or gesture recognition, digital assistants that can handle natural language, and more. Accelerating these workloads via the NPU makes them run faster, keeps the CPU empty, and reduces battery consumption.

This all sounds well and good, but let’s be honest: this is still very much in the future. Creative professionals may already be looking to Ryzen AI-based processors that will speed up functionality in their favorite clusters, but for the vast majority of them they are looking for added value. For most users, AI acceleration is a solution to a problem that has not yet been addressed. That AMD Pervasive AI Developer Competition His writing indicates this. Competition should encourage developers to build exciting AI applications. Such a thing is usually not necessary when such workloads are already abundant.

AMD makes good laptop processors with powerful GPUs and now also strong NPU integration. The latter makes the chips future-proof, but not suitable for everyday use in laptops Game changer at this time. If you remove the AI ​​capabilities, the Ryzen 8040 mobile is essentially a re-release of the Ryzen 7040 mobile. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t encourage enthusiasm. We’ll wait for benchmarks, but we suspect those looking for an AMD desktop laptop might find better value for money in a Ryzen 7040-equipped machine when the Ryzen 8040 has just launched.