AMD brings AI to business desktops with Ryzen Pro chips

AMD today launched its most recent generation of business processors for business PCs, the Ryzen Pro 8000 series, for both desktop and laptops. For now, AMD will be the only CPU vendor offering AI-powered NPUs in business desktop PCs.

AMD’s launch arrives on the heels of Intel’s 14th-gen vPro platform, which also offers desktop and mobile parts. The difference is that Intel launched its vPro refresh based upon the “Raptor Lake Refresh” architecture, which lacks AI; AMD’s Ryzen Pro 8000 series is relatively consistent across both its mobile and desktop offerings. However, not every new Ryzen Pro 8000 mobile or desktop chip includes AI support.

If you’ve been following our coverage of AMD’s Ryzen 8000 mobile CPUs and AMD’s corresponding Ryzen 8000 desktop processors, AMD’s latest chip lineups shouldn’t be surprising. AMD’s latest Ryzen Pro 8000 processors pretty much overlap its consumer offerings, with the Ryzen 9 Pro 8945HS (8 cores, 16 threads, boosting from 4.0GHz to 5.2GHz) on down. AMD’s Ryzen Pro 8000 desktop processors are similar, with the Ryzen 8700G (8 cores, 16 threads, boosting from 4.2GHz to 5.1GHz) at the top of the stack. All of the new processors are 4nm parts, based on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture.

What’s new? Some of AMD’s Ryzen Pro 8000 desktop chips now offer Ryzen AI, a competitive advantage that AMD is pushing hard. (AMD’s existing Ryzen 8000 desktop lineup supports Ryzen AI.) The Ryzen Pro lineup now also offers “E” versions, which reduce the available power envelope from between 45- and 65W to a flat 35W cTDP. AMD is also touting its advantages in AI and power in the mobile space. AMD’s desktop chips now include the Pluton security coprocessor, too, the first time that AMD has added it to a desktop part; cloud-based remote manageability features are also present.

The HP Elitebook 835 and 845 G11 and the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen5 and P14s, are some of the devices that will use the new Ryzen processors.

“Together all these processors we announced today really push the boundaries of performance and efficiency from AMD like we’ve never done before,” said Ronak Shah, global commercial product marketing manager at AMD, in a briefing with reporters.

AMD’s Ryzen Pro 8000 mobile processors

AMD refers to its mobile Ryzen 8000 processors as the Ryzen Pro 8040 series of mobile processors, though its desktop chips are called the AMD Ryzen Pro 8000 lineup.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Millions of AI PCs have already shipped, based upon their combination of CPU, GPU, and (sometimes) NPU, which can collaborate on AI-specific tasks if coded appropriately. By 2026, six out of 10 PCs should qualify as AI PCs, Shah said, though there’s still no formal definition of the term. The argument is that corporations and their sensitive business data could have more of a demand for local on-PC AI than consumers, especially if Microsoft eventually decides to run Copilot on local PCs.

“There’s no model for running the Copilot infrastructure on-premises or with any additional data protection beyond what Microsoft offers,” Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said in a direct message on Twitter.com. “This highlights why customers must approach Copilot with caution and understand that whatever compliance and data retention and governance terms Microsoft offers are all they get.”

Most of AMD’s new Ryzen Pro 8000 mobile chips include Ryzen AI, its NPU. Those marked with an asterisk do not.

Based on PCWorld’s laptop tests, AMD’s mobile Ryzen chips typically do very well in CPU-specific tasks, sometimes outperforming Intel’s mobile Core chips. AMD showed a series of benchmarks demonstrating how its chips running at 15W outperformed even Intel Core H-series chips at 28 watts.

In the CPU-specific Blender benchmark, for example, AMD claimed that its Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U outperformed an Intel Core 7 165U by 43 percent, and the Intel Core Ultra 165H by 13 percent. In a number of CPU-specific benchmarks, AMD claimed that its Ryzen 9 8945HS outperformed the Core Ultra 9 185H by between 5 and 23 percent.

In Microsoft Office apps, though, AMD claimed that Ryzen Pro 8840U trounced the Core Ultra 7 by a longshot: 70 percent on average.

So far, there aren’t too many AI-enhanced business applications for the desktop. Two key examples are Adobe Photoshop, which runs some AI-powered improvements, as well as Microsoft Teams, which taps the NPU for prolonged, low-power AI enhancements during video calls.

AMD’s Shah claimed that a Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U laptop running at 15W can last 7 hours, 21 minutes on a Teams call (with a 56Wh battery) versus 5 hours, 29 minutes for a Core Ultra 7 165U running at 15W on a 57Wh battery. AMD claimed that its own battery life could sneak by an Apple M3 laptop by 13 minutes.

AMD also says that its Ryzen Pro 8000 mobile chips excel at AI, in general. For now, AMD’s Ryzen NPUs generate 16 TOPS — or trillion operations per second — (for a total of 39 when adding the CPU and GPU). That, er, tops Intel’s 14th-gen chips with 34 TOPS.

AMD’s Ryzen Pro 8000 desktop processors

Intel hasn’t officially said what its AI plans are for the upcoming Arrow Lake desktop chip. But for now, the Ryzen platform is the only desktop PC platform with AI.

Here are AMD’s new desktop Ryzen 8000 processors. AMD claims they’ll use substantially less power than Intel’s corresponding Core chips, but with corresponding or even better performance.

AMD representatives wouldn’t comment directly on whether its new Ryzen 8000 processors would qualify PCs built around them as AI PCs.

“We believe an AI PC requires strong CPU, GPU, and NPU engines, which is what AMD has been delivering for more than a year with our Ryzen 7040 and now 8040 Series,” an AMD representative said in an email. “At our December Advancing AI event, we disclosed that our next-gen ‘Strix Point’ mobile processors with XDNA 2 architecture would have up to 3 [times] the generative AI performance of the current generation. We believe this performance will position us to remain the leading choice for next-gen AI PCs.”