AMD has unveiled a huge variety of new CPUs in the current generation Ryzen 7000 series, addressing different 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 data centers and consumer PCs. . Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, delivered the opening keynote of CES 2023, speaking about the needs of computing in our world today and the growing prevalence of AI, saying that AMD is uniquely positioned to take advantage.
AMD claims leadership with thinner, lighter and more energy efficient laptops. The company has started using a new naming convention where the first digit of the product number indicates the generation, the second digit indicates relative performance within a series, and the third digit tells you which Zen architecture generation it is based on. Suffixes continue to indicate power targets, with the U Series designed to run at 15W-28W in thin and light laptops, the regular HS Series running at 35-45W, and the high-performance HX models in gaming and professional laptops will run at 55W+ .
Starting with the most notable CPU models, the new Ryzen 7040 series is the first with 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 simultaneous AI streams, these new CPUs can multitask AI workloads and also offload AI processing from the CPU and GPU, resulting in significant power savings. AMD claims its new offering is up to 50 percent more efficient than the Apple M2 SoC’s integrated Neural Engine.
A decoder like this will help buyers who may be confused by AMD’s new naming scheme
Benefits include significantly reducing the impact of AI workloads on battery life and keeping data on the device rather than uploading it to a cloud service for processing. AMD suggests that AI on PC will enable improved visual quality in games and the arrival of much more advanced non-playing characters in the future. Real-time security and predictive user interface customizations are other predicted uses.
Microsoft EVP and Chief Product Office Panos Panay joined Su on stage during the keynote to talk about using Ryzen AI in the future, plus current use cases such as real-time noise reduction, portrait blur, eye contact correction, and automatic framing in video to call to action.
The AMD Ryzen 7040 series is based on the Zen 4 core architecture, with integrated RDNA 3 graphics. These CPUs are made on a 4nm process and AMD expects a battery life of 30 hours. The top of the line Ryzen 9 7940HS has eight cores, 16 threads and a boost speed of 5.2 GHz. AMD claims it’s 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 at content creation. The first laptops with Ryzen 7×40 CPUs will ship in March 2023.
Different CPU series within the same generation will appeal to different market segments
The more expensive Ryzen 7045 series is based on the Zen 4 architecture and uses the same designs as desktop Ryzen 7000 CPUs. It is manufactured on a 5nm process. The flagship Ryzen 9 7945HX has 16 cores and 32 threads, 80 MB of total cache, a boost speed of 5.4 GHz and a TDP target of 55 W+. The Ryzen 9 7845HX fits below it with 12 cores and 24 threads, while the Ryzen 7 7745HX has 8 cores and 16 threads. There is 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 also claims a huge leap in mobile game performance, with 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 ship in February 2023, with Alienware, Asus and Lenovo confirmed to be among the first brands to do so.
Lower in the stack are AMD’s Ryzen 7035 and 7030 series CPUs based on the Zen 3 architecture, and there’s also a new entry-level Ryzen 7020 series based on Zen 2.
AMD has 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 optimized for thin and light laptops. All four GPUs are based on the RDNA3 architecture and use 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. Laptops from Alienware, Asus, Lenovo and other OEMs with these GPUs will go on sale in February. Later this year, the company will introduce Smartshift RSR (Radeon Super Resolution), which improves performance by moving upscaling calculations from the GPU to a Ryzen CPU.
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