Looking to make its mark on the burgeoning AI market, AMD has released the latest processors in its Ryzen portfolio – the Ryzen 8040 Series – which are expected to be broadly available from leading OEMs in the first quarter of next year.
With the integrated Ryzen AI NPU on-die on select models, AMD says it is bringing even more state-of-the-art AI PCs to market with up to 1.6x more AI processing performance than prior AMD models and aimed at delivering new premium experiences and AI-ready capabilities. To further enable great AI experiences, AMD is also making Ryzen AI Software widely available for users to easily build and deploy machine learning models on their AI PCs.
“We continue to deliver high performance and power efficient NPUs with Ryzen AI technology to reimagine the PC,” says Jack Huynh, senior VP and GM of AMD computing and graphics business. “The increased AI capabilities of the 8040 series will now handle larger models to enable the next phase of AI user experiences.”
AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processors offer next-level performance from everyday productivity to incredible content creation, with the Ryzen 9 8945HS processor offering up to 64% faster video editing and up to 37% faster 3D rendering than competitors, while gamers can enjoy up to 77% faster gaming performance.
Designed on AMD “Zen 4” processor architecture and with up to eight cores capable of delivering up to 16 threads of processing power, the Ryzen 9 8945HS offers leading single-core and multi-core performance. With AMD RDNA 3 architecture-based Radeon graphics and select systems powered by AMD XDNA architecture built for AMD Ryzen AI, the new processors are designed for creative professionals, gamers, and mainstream users looking for a powerful laptop with trusted performance and the capability to run advanced AI experiences.
AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processors also come with advanced LPDDR5 memory support. With these new processors, users are able to take advantage of immersive virtual experiences, gaming and streaming, and trust that their devices support demanding AI use cases while maintaining power efficiency.
The new processors are ready to leverage the full range of the Windows 11 ecosystem for optimised performance including full support for Windows 11 security features. Select systems with an AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processor can also access out-of-the-box AI with Window Studio Effects Pack enabling privacy at home or on-the-go with background blur, eye gaze tracking, and noise cancellation.
“It’s been incredible to see AMD and Microsoft’s long partnership moving into the next wave of technology bringing AI innovation to our shared customers,” says Pavan Davuluri, CVP Windows + Devices at Microsoft. “We’re so excited to see Ryzen 8040 Series processor-powered devices come to life in the Windows ecosystem and can’t wait to see what developers and customers do with all of this innovation.”
Ryzen AI Software is now widely available, making it possible for developers to build and deploy machine learning models trained in frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow and run them on select laptops powered by Ryzen AI.
The 1.0 version of Ryzen AI software enables ONNX Runtime applications and offers a pre-optimised model zoo on Hugging Face, allowing users to get started and up and running AI models in minutes. Laptops with Ryzen AI can offload AI models to the NPU, thereby freeing up the CPU to reduce power consumption while extending battery life.
As part of the Ryzen AI software launch, developers can take advantage of Ryzen AI to build AI applications with advanced gesture recognition, biometric authentication, and other accessibility features. Developers are also given early access support for Automatic Speech Recognition models like Whisper and Large Language Models (LLM) like OPT and Llama-2 in order to build natural language speech interfaces for their applications and unlock other Natural Language Processing features such as document summarisation and email assistance.