AMD Ryzen 8040 Series Processors With Integrated ‘Ryzen AI’ Announced

AMD has unveiled the first of its Ryzen 8000 series processors, the Ryzen 8040 family for slim and light laptops. Much like the Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” series that they replace, most Ryzen 8040 models, codenamed “Hawk Point”, feature an integrated NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for on-device AI workloads. Laptops from Dell, Lenovo, Acer, HP, Asus and Razer with these new processors should go on sale around the world in Q1 2024.

The CPU and GPU cores are based on AMD’s current-gen Zen 4 and RDNA3 architectures respectively. The company refers to this combination of CPU, GPU and NPU resources as ‘Ryzen AI’, and says users can expect up to a 1.4X improvement in performance with large language and computer vision models, compared to the previous generation.

AMD specifies up to 16 trillion NPU operations per second (TOPS), compared to 10 million for the previous generation. CPU performance in traditional single- and multi-threaded workloads is said to beat that of Intel’s current 13th Gen H-series Core CPUs, with up to a 1.77X boost in selected games. However, Intel’s 14th Gen ‘Meteor Lake’ CPUs with integrated AI capabilities are expected to launch shortly.

Nine new CPU models have been announced, with the top-end Ryzen 9 8945HS featuring eight multi-threaded cores running at up to 5.2GHz, an integrated Radeon 780M GPU, and a 35-50W TDP range. Not all models feature integrated NPUs; the entry-level quad-core Ryzen 3 8440U runs at up to 4.7GHz and offers the lower-spec Ryzen 740M integrated GPU with a 15-30W TDP range.

The company says Ryzen 8040 series processors will leverage Ryzen AI to allow users to run modern-day AI-enhanced applications on the go, even when running on battery power, without needing to send data to remote cloud servers for processing. According to AMD, this reduces latency and improves performance, allows for much tighter security when it comes to sensitive data, and is more cost-efficient overall.

The dedicated AI acceleration hardware is based on AMD’s XDNA architecture, which was developed following the company’s acquisition of FPGA pioneer Xilinx in 2022. AMD says over 50 laptop models from all major companies based on Ryzen AI-enabled Ryzen 7040 CPUs have been launched over the past year, and millions of units have been sold and are being used already. Simultaneously, the company says it is working with major software developers including Adobe, Microsoft, Topaz Labs, Magix, Avid, and Zoom to make sure Ryzen AI is widely supported.

Examples of software features that leverage Ryzen AI in Adobe Photoshop include skin smoothing and smart portrait neural filters, sky replacement, and content-aware fill, while Premiere Pro can use it to accelerate automatic reframing, captioning, and speech-to-text. The Black Magic DaVinci Resolve video editor uses Ryzen AI for voice isolation, depth mapping, relighting, masking people or objects, and auto colour balancing, among other features. In addition, AMD has rolled out its Ryzen AI Software Platform along with tutorials to help developers create and distribute software that can run on Windows.

At the launch, AMD also teased its next-gen “Strix Point” CPU models which will be equipped with significantly more powerful NPUs based on the upcoming XDNA 2 architecture, and will ship later in 2024. This generation of processors is already being touted to achieve 3X better NPU performance in generative AI workloads, enabling PCs to run applications that can currently only run on remote servers. Previous leaks and rumours suggest that Strix Point CPUs will feature a mix of up to 12 heterogenous CPU cores based on variants of the next-gen Zen 5 architecture as well as an improved GPU architecture.