AMD announced the new Ryzen processor series, which we will start seeing in laptops next year. The 9 new chips introduced are called Ryzen 8040 and are equipped with AMD’s ‘XDNA’ artificial intelligence technology.
The new processors, codenamed ‘Hawk Point’, are on their way to be shipped to laptop manufacturers and will be available for use in new devices in early 2024. They will all use AMD’s Zen 4 CPU core architecture and RDNA 3 graphics architecture. The flagship of the series will be Ryzen 9 8945HS.
While much of AMD’s press release focused on enterprise applications of on-chip AI, the key takeaway here is that native AI is about to become much more mainstream. AMD introduced the neural processing unit (NPU) in the Ryzen 7040 series, and this was seen as an important step in the popularization of native artificial intelligence. For those unfamiliar, ‘native’ AI describes on-chip machine learning capabilities that allow you to run AI-powered workloads locally, unlike popular AI tools like ChatGPT that use cloud computing for users to access from their devices.
AI-on-a-chip has many advantages: For starters, there will be no mandatory internet connection required to use it since there is no cloud server involved. It will also help reduce some security concerns related to AI, as you won’t need to upload data to an external platform.
All in all, the upcoming Hawk Point chips look pretty impressive. AMD claimed that the chips offer a 1.4x performance boost in productive AI workloads compared to the Ryzen 7040 series, and also provided some comparative numbers with Intel’s current i9-13900H, stating that the flagship 8040 chip will outperform its Intel counterpart in almost every area.
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