AMD Launches Ryzen PRO 8000 Desktop APUs, Bringing Graphics & AI Leadership To Businesses

AMD Launches Ryzen PRO 8000 Desktop APUs, Bringing Graphics & AI Leadership To Businesses 1

AMD today announces the launch of its Ryzen PRO 8000 "Hawk Point" Desktop APUs for the business segment, bringing CPU, GPU, & AI leadership to commercial PCs with a strong set of "PRO" technologies.

With the rise of AI, the business segment has seen new workloads that require a new generation of chips. These workloads and AI-powered experiences include running Generative AI locally on PCs, enabling a wide spectrum of personalization, productivity, and privacy features.

Today marks the expansion of the Zen 4 "PRO" family for the commercial desktop and mobile segment in the form of Ryzen PRO 8000 (Desktop) and Ryzen PRO 8040 (Laptop) APUs. The latest family includes Zen 4 CPU cores, RDNA 3 GPU cores, and XDNA NPUs, all packed within a singular package. Features of the family include:

AMD Ryzen AI - Extending Leadership With First AI-Powered Desktops

Zen 4 - World's Fastest & Most Advanced x86 Processor

4nm - Revolutionary Power Efficiency Upgrades

AMD Pro Technologies - Cutting Edge Security, Simplified Manageability

Wi-Fi 7 / BT 5.4 - Enabling Seamless Connectivity

The AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Desktop APUs consist of 8 APUs. These APUs are essentially the same as the existing Ryzen 8000G & Ryzen 8000GE chips. The Ryzen 7 SKUs feature 8 cores & 16 threads, the Ryzen 5 SKUs feature 6 cores & 12 threads while the Ryzen 5 SKUs feature 4 cores & 8 threads. The Ryzen PRO 8000G SKUs operate at TDPs between 45-65W (45W cTDP) while the 8000GE SKUs operate at 35W cTDPs. The chips also pack AMD's RDNA 3 iGPUs with up to 12 compute units, the Radeon 780M/760M/740M.

But like the original Ryzen 8000G/8000GE SKUs, certain AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 APUs don't feature AI NPUs (8500G/GE & 8300G/GE). These APUs will still be able to run AI workloads on their CPU & GPU but that's about it. The APUs offer up to 16 TOPs from the NPU alone and a total of 39 system TOPs (NPU/GPU/CPU combined).

As for performance comparisons, the AMD Ryzen PRO 8700G was compared against the Intel Core i7-14700, both chips were running at 65W. In terms of graphics, the Ryzen PRO 8000 "Hawk Point" APUs offer up to 3x the graphics performance and up to 47% better overall performance. Intel did announce its Meteor Lake-PS CPUs recently for the embedded LGA 1851 platforms which adopt a faster CPU, GPU, and NPU but Ryzen PRO 8000 Desktop APUs should still be better based on what we have seen on the mobile front (Ryzen 8040 vs Core Ultra 100).

AMD also slams Intel's vPRO technologies with its own AMD PRO capabilities and says that their solution offers the same security and manageability features across all PCs while Intel has very inconsistent security and manageability features based on the PC type such as:

vPRO Essentials

vPRO Enterprise (Windows)

vPRO EVO Design

vPRO Enterprise for Chrome

Furthermore, AMD also offers enhanced PRO Security in the form of Microsoft Pluton security, the first of its kind for its desktop PCs starting in 2024.

Microsoft Pluton is designed to offer chip-to-cloud protection. There's also AMD Memory Guard which helps protect a company's sensitive business data when an employee's PC is lost or stolen.

In addition to AMD-specific security features, there are also partner-specific security features that will be provided by vendors & OEMs for their respective PC platforms and software ecosystems. So as for the desktop portfolio, HP and Lenovo will mainly be offering their latest desktop solutions but users can also drop in these chips on any existing AM5 motherboards.