The AMD Ryzen PRO processors, designed to meet the fast-changing needs of business PC users, have been launched in the South African market.

The new processors are available in three iterations, each with different features catering to various workloads.

Offering desktop-class performance in an ultrathin notebook, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 2700U offers great system performance and up to 16 hours of battery life to enable all-day productivity.

For desktops, the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 2400G and AMD Ryzen 3 PRO 2200G deliver world-class performance on heavily graphics-intensive commercial and workstation-grade workloads ranging from graphics design to 3D CAD to medical imaging, while also excelling at general office productivity tasks.

Designed specifically for the commercial market, all Ryzen PRO processors provide security, reliability and performance with the award-winning AMD Zen architecture.

James Blackman, EMEA sales director at AMD, tells IT-Online that shifts in the market have driven the need for a radically new approach to processor design.

Increasing complexity and a raft of new security threats are combining with increasingly demanding applications and IT infrastructure requirements, forcing businesses to closely examine any new products.

“Users are more demanding than ever before and want to run more media-rich applications – and they don’t want to have to wait for their PCs,” Blackman says. “This means their processors have to deliver power-efficient performance along with superior graphics and sound.”

The IT manager is faced with budget constraints but is still expected to deliver the technology that meets users’ increasingly demanding workloads. This includes a requirement for superior graphics capability that can handle visual workloads.

The latest security technology has to be part of the package, to meet the continually-evolving threat landscape, Blackman adds.

“Meanwhile, ever-changing business needs require PCs that keep pace now and over the system’s lifecycle,” he says.

Although the AMD Ryzen PRO Processor with Radeon Vega Graphics provides a generational leap in performance, it fits into existing IT environments and addresses users’ needs without creating new issues or challenges.

Industry-standard management tools help IT managers to avoid getting locked into proprietary solutions that can narrow choices, reduce features and add cost.

“Plus it enables innovative machine intelligence and powerful multitasking capabilities that accelerate demanding workloads,” Blackman says. “The integrated, premium Radeon Vega graphics accelerate visual computing and multimedia applications; and AMD Secure Technologies enable state-of-the-art security features from power-on to power-off.”

OEM vendors have already introduced the AMD Ryzen PRO into their product ranges, with offerings from HP and other vendors available now.

Blackman points out that the new Ryzen PRO processors mark a complete departure from the company’s previous-generation x86 APU architecture, offering a wealth of new features and benefits.

“This product offers outstanding energy efficiency and enhanced performance over our last generation,” he says. “Because AMD Ryzen PRO processors with Radeon Vega Graphics use AMD’s “Zen” core design, they deliver a 52% IPC uplift over the previous architecture.”

Compared to the previous generation of Ryzen processors, the new products offer longevity, stability, commercial-graded quality, better security and manageability.

The inclusion of Vega graphics, meanwhile, marks AMD’s biggest evolution in core graphics IP over the past five years.

“Our aim with Vega was to enable unprecedented gaming, professional and machine intelligence capabilities with a dramatically different, scalable architecture that’s focused on moving data with intelligence, with the entire design working together to find optimised ways to arrive at the best possible result,” Blackman explains.

“The Vega architecture’s unique memory management capabilities, cache hierarchy, geometry engine, and compute units work in concert to complete high priority tasks, and smartly schedules around less urgent work.

“Integrated Vega graphics architecture with AMD Zen cores using the AMD Infinity Fabric has enabled incredible advances in efficient performance with the new processors.”

Infinity Fabric is AMD’s current DNA for all of its chip designs, enabling fast data transfers that take advantage of the latest technology on the ASIC.

Infinity Fabric aims to increase performance and power efficiency; enable scalable bandwidth, low latency, and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities; create flexible and coherent interfaces across x86, ARM and GPU cores; and offer robust security and authentication.

The new AMD Ryzen PRO processors also feature AMD SenseMI technology, a set of learning and adapting features that help the processor to customise its performance to the user and their applications.

This is enabled by technologies that include Neural Net Prediction, Smart Prefetch, Pure Power and Precision Boost 2.

In the notebooks, Mobile Extended Frequency Range (mXFR) lets the AMD Ryzen PRO Mobile processor with Radeon Vega Graphics offer faster performance in mobile systems with premium processor cooling solutions, while Extended Frequency Range (XFR) gives an automatic extra performance boost with premium processor cooling for desktops.

With security a major concern for all users, the AMD GuardMI technology enables power-on to power-off protection with a powerful security co-processor inside every AMD Ryzen PRO CPU.

Features include transparent secure memory encryption; secure boot; trusted application enablement; and security in the production environment.

AMD delivers security, manageability and virtualisation solutions built on open standards, delivered via its DASH out-of-band management tools on the new processors.

AMD South Africa’s Craig Dawson launches the AMD Ryzen PRO into the local market with James Blackman.