- AMD revealed its new Ryzen 8040 processors for notebooks which sport an upgraded Ryzen AI NPU.
- The processors are built on AMD’s Zen 4 processor architecture, feature RDNA 3 graphics and reportedly outperform Intel’s processors, according to AMD of course.
- AMD is also making its Ryzen AI Software widely available.
Not only did AMD announce new artificial intelligence compute accelerators this week, Team Red showed off some new mobile processors destined to arrive in notebooks early next year.
The new AMD Ryzen 8040 series includes nine processors spread across the Ryzen 3 (entry tier), Ryzen 5 (mid tier), Ryzen 7 (high tier), and Ryzen 9 (highest tier) families. These new chips are designed on the Zen 4 processor architecture and also sport RDNA 3 graphics and support LPDDR5 memory.
| Model | Cores / Threads | Boost/Base Frequency | Total Cache | TDP | NPU |
| AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS | 8C/16T | Up to 5.2 GHz / 4.0 GHz | 24MB | 45W | Yes |
| AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS | 8C/16T | Up to 5.1 GHz / 3.8 GHz | 24MB | 45W | Yes |
| AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS | 8C/16T | Up to 5.1 GHz / 3.3 GHz | 24MB | 28W | Yes |
| AMD Ryzen 7 8840U | 8C/16T | Up to 5.1 GHz / 3.3 GHz | 24MB | 28W | Yes |
| AMD Ryzen 5 8645HS | 6C/12T | Up to 5.0 GHz / 4.3 GHz | 22MB | 45W | Yes |
| AMD Ryzen 5 8640HS | 6C/12T | Up to 4.9 GHz / 3.5 GHz | 22MB | 28W | Yes |
| AMD Ryzen 5 8640U | 6C/12T | Up to 4.9 GHz / 3.5 GHz | 22MB | 28W | Yes |
| AMD Ryzen 5 8540U | 6C/12T | Up to 4.9 GHz / 3.2 GHz | 22MB | 28W | NA |
| AMD Ryzen 3 8440U | 4C/8T | Up to 4.7 GHz / 3.0 GHz | 12MB | 28W | NA |
AMD Ryzen 8040 series lineup.
As you can see, the majority of these new processors include an AMD Ryzen AI NPU. This NPU performs 1.6 times better than the NPU that was embedded into the Ryzen 7040 series. The goal here is to give budding AI developers a way to easily create and deploy those creations on a small scale.
“We continue to deliver high performance and power-efficient NPUs with Ryzen AI technology to reimagine the PC,” senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s computing and graphics business, Jack Hunyh said in a press release. “The increased AI capabilities of the 8040 series will now handle larger models to enable the next phase of AI user experiences.”
As for the processors themselves, AMD said that in testing with an Intel Core i9-13900H its Ryzen 9 8945HS performed 64 percent faster in video editing, 37 percent faster in 3D rendering and 77 percent faster in gaming. Granted, this is AMD reporting this so we recommend waiting for independent testing before taking these performance figures to the bank.
This all sounds very promising and we should start seeing these processors in notebooks from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Razer in early 2024.
AI software for all
Alongside these new processors, AMD also announced that it was making its Ryzen AI Software widely available.
The first version of this software enables ONNX Runtime applications and offers a pre-optimised model zoo on Hugging Face so that developers can get AI models up and running in minutes. The firm says that users can create AI applications with advanced gesture recognition, biometric authentication and a range of other accessibility features.
To encourage this, AMD’s Pervasive AI Developers Contest offers a prize pool of $160 000 to developers who use the software to create new applications for AI. There are three categories developers can enter including one calling for applications that use vision, speech and domain-optimised large language models on Ryzen AI-powered PCs.
AMD is tired of lagging in the AI races and this week’s announcements may just be the beginning of a long fight, provided AI remains as popular as it has been for most of this year.
