AMD has unveiled a huge variety of new CPUs in its current-generation Ryzen 7000 series, addressing a variety of laptop segments. In addition, the company showed off its new Radeon RX 7000 series laptop GPUs and announced the new XDNA architecture for AI processing, which will eventually find its way into everything from the company’s dedicated accelerators to datacentres to consumer-grade PCs. AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su delivered the CES 2023 opening keynote, talking about the needs of computing in our world today and the growing prevalence of AI, saying AMD is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this.
AMD is claiming leadership with thinner, lighter, more power-efficient laptops. The company has begun using a new product naming convention with the first digit of the product number signifying the generation, the second signifying relative performance within a series, and the third telling you what Zen architecture generation it is based on. Suffixes continue to denote power targets, with the U-series designed to run at 15W-28W in thin-and-light laptops, the mainstream HS series runs at 35-45W and the high-performance HX models in gaming and pro laptops will run at 55W+.
Starting with the most notable CPU models, the new Ryzen 7040 series is the first to feature integrated Ryzen AI hardware based on the new XDNA architecture. AMD claims this is “the world’s first integrated AI engine on an X86 processor”. With up to four concurrent AI streams, these new CPUs will be able to multitask AI workloads and also offload AI processing from the CPU and GPU resulting in significant power savings. AMD claims its new offerings are up to 50 percent more efficient than the Apple M2 SoC’s integrated Neural Engine.
A decoder like this will help buyers who might be confused by AMD’s new naming scheme
Benefits include severely reducing the impact of AI workloads on battery life, and keeping data on-device rather than uploading it to a cloud service for processing. AMD suggests that in the future, AI on the PC will allow for improved visual quality in games and the advent of much more sophisticated non-playing characters. Real-time security and predictive user interface customisations are other forecasted applications.
Microsoft EVP and Chief Product Office Panos Panay joined Su on stage at the keynote to talk about leveraging Ryzen AI in the future, plus current-day use cases such as real-time noise suppression, portrait blur, eye contact correction and automatic framing in video calls.
The AMD Ryzen 7040 series is based on the Zen 4 core architecture, with integrated RDNA 3 graphics. These CPUs will be fabbed on a 4nm process and AMD projects 30 hours of battery life. The top-end Ryzen 9 7940HS has eight cores, 16 threads, and a 5.2GHz boost speed. AMD claims it is between 11 percent and 39 percent faster than the Apple M1 Pro. The mid-range Ryzen 7 7840HS has eight cores and 16 threads, and AMD claims it is between 23 percent and 106 percent better than an Intel Core i7-1280P in content creation workloads. The first laptops with Ryzen 7×40 CPUs will begin shipping in March 2023.
Different CPU series within the same generation will address different market segments
The higher-end Ryzen 7045 series is based on the Zen 4 architecture, using the same designs as desktop Ryzen 7000 CPUs. It is fabbed on a 5nm process. The flagship Ryzen 9 7945HX has 16 cores and 32 threads, 80 MB total cache memory, a 5.4GHz boost speed, and 55W+ TDP target. The Ryzen 9 7845HX slots in below it with 12 cores and 24 threads, while the Ryzen 7 7745HX has 8 cores and 16 threads. There’s also a Ryzen 5 7645HX with 6 cores and 12 threads. The platform supports DDR5 RAM, PCIe 4.0. and Wi-Fi 6E.
These CPUs are aimed at gamers and creators who need power for multitasking, 4K video editing, or 3D rendering. AMD claims a huge leap in mobile game performance as well, delivering up to 18 percent better single-threaded performance and up to 78 percent faster all-thread performance than the Ryzen 6900HX in Cinebench. The first laptops with 7045 CPUs will begin shipping in February 2023, with Alienware, Asus, and Lenovo confirmed to be among the first brands to do so.
Lower in the stack, AMD’s Ryzen 7035 and 7030 series CPUs are based on the Zen 3 architecture and there’s also a new entry-evel Ryzen 7020 series based on Zen 2.
AMD also unveiled new GPUs for laptops. The Radeon RX7600M XT and Radeon RX7600M are aimed at the gaming segment while the Radeon RX7700S and RX7600S are optimised for thin-and-light laptops. All four GPUs are based on the RDNA3 architecture and use 8GB of GDDR6 memory. Laptops from Alienware, Asus, Lenovo, and other OEMs featuring these GPUs will go on sale in February. Later this year the company will introduce Smartshift RSR (Radeon Super Resolution) which improves performance by offloading upscaling calculations from the GPU to a Ryzen CPU.
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