AMD has unveiled a huge range of new CPUs in its current-gen Ryzen 7000 series, addressing a variety of laptop segments. Additionally, 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 datacenters and consumer PCs. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, delivered the keynote at CES 2023, speaking about the computing needs in our world today and the increasing prevalence of AI, saying that AMD is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this.
AMD is claiming the lead with thinner, lighter and more energy efficient laptops. The company began 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 denoting which generation of Zen architecture it is based on. Suffixes continue to denote power targets, with the U series projected to run at 15W-28W in thin and light laptops, the mainstream 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 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 simultaneous AI streams, these new CPUs will be able to run multitasking AI workloads and also offload AI processing from the CPU and GPU, resulting in significant power savings. AMD claims that its new offerings are up to 50% more efficient than the Apple M2 SoC’s built-in Neural Engine.
A decoder like this will help buyers who might be confused by AMD’s new naming scheme.
Benefits include dramatically reducing the impact of AI workloads on battery life and keeping data on the device instead of uploading it to a cloud service for processing. AMD suggests that, in the future, AI on PC will allow for better visual quality in games and the advent of much more sophisticated non-player characters. Real-time security and predictive user interface customizations are other anticipated applications.
Microsoft EVP and Chief Product Office Panos Panay joined Su onstage at the keynote to talk about how to leverage Ryzen AI in the future, as well as current use cases such as real-time noise suppression, portrait blurring, eye contact correction, and auto-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 manufactured on a 4nm process and AMD projects 30 hours of battery life. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 7940HS has eight cores, 16 threads and a boost clock of 5.2GHz. AMD claims it is between 11% and 39% faster than the Apple M1 Pro. The mid-range Ryzen 7 7840HS has eight cores and 16 threads, and AMD claims it’s between 23% and 106% better than an Intel Core i7-1280P in content creation workloads. The first laptops with Ryzen 7×40 CPUs will go on sale in March 2023.
Different CPU series within the same generation will serve different market segments
The high-end Ryzen 7045 series is based on the Zen 4 architecture, using the same designs as the desktop Ryzen 7000 CPUs. It is manufactured in a 5 nm process. The flagship Ryzen 9 7945HX has 16 cores and 32 threads, 80 MB of total cache memory, a boost speed of 5.4 GHz and 55 W + target TDP. The Ryzen 9 7845HX has slots below 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 the power for multitasking, 4K video editing or 3D rendering. AMD also claims a huge leap in mobile gaming performance, delivering up to 18% better single-threaded performance and up to 78% faster single-threaded performance than the Ryzen 6900HX in Cinebench. The first laptops with 7045 CPUs will go on sale in February 2023, with Alienware, Asus and Lenovo confirmed as the first brands to do so.
Further down the stack, AMD’s Ryzen 7035 and 7030 series CPUs are 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 8GB 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 offloading GPU upscaling calculations to a Ryzen CPU.