AMD is launching new processors for laptops. The AMD Ryzen 8040 Mobile does not make any architectural leaps, but rather moves into the spotlight thanks to AI acceleration.

AMD introduces Ryzen 8040 Mobile. Anyone who is familiar with AMD’s eccentric naming conventions for Ryzen chips will immediately recognize from the name that we shouldn’t expect any major technological leaps from the new chip series. The thousand in the series name has nothing to do with the node or architecture of the CPUs, but simply refers to the year of release. “7” means 2023, “8” means 2024. These new chips will therefore be available in the first quarter of next year.

The ten is more important in the naming: The “4” makes it clear that these new processors are built with the Zen 4 architecture, just like the Ryzen 7040 last year. On the CPU side, we shouldn’t expect any major innovations compared to last year. AMD is today launching an expanded product range with four to eight cores and multithreading, with TDPs configurable up to 15 watts at the lower limit. This makes the chips ideal for thin to ultra-thin laptops. The maximum clock frequency corresponds to previous editions of Ryzen Mobile.

The changes on the graphical side are also limited. The Radeon 780M chiplet is still the most powerful GPU chiplet available. It performs better than the competitor’s built-in GPU, which AMD happily compared when it was launched. Major improvements in the Ryzen 8040 Mobile compared to the Ryzen 7040 Mobile are also not expected.

AI

Is there any news other than the release year? Fortunately, most newly announced processors come with an NPU chiplet. AMD fully embraced AI acceleration with the launch of the Ryzen Pro 7040 Mobile six months ago and is now expanding NPU integration to almost the entire 8040 lineup. The current NPU in the Ryzen 8040 – HawkPoint – follows that Phoenix-NPU in the previous chip generation. The new NPU moves 39 TOPS (tensor operations per second) compared to the previous 33 TOPS.

AMD goes even further and talks about AI PCs powered by its processors. They have up to 1.6 times more AI computing power than previous models. “AI computing power” is an abstract concept that AMD explains. There are already more than a hundred AI-powered experiences available for Windows computers today, accelerated by 8040 series NPUs. AMD refers to individual functions that come primarily from Adome and its competitor Black Magic. For example, DaVnci Resolve includes nineteen features that can benefit from the NPU, Photoshop has 23, assuming you count all variations of the Neural Filter separately.

AMD further emphasizes that the chips easily support various AI models. Developers can run models trained in frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow almost instantly on laptops with Ryzen AI (the NPU) on board. The ONNX runtime supports optimized models, available via Hugging Face. Developers can get started and build AI-powered features for voice or gesture recognition, digital assistants that can handle natural language, and more. By accelerating such workloads via the NPU, they run faster, reducing the load on the CPU and reducing battery consumption.

A solution without problems

That all sounds well and good, but let’s be honest: that’s still largely in the future. Creative professionals may be looking forward to AI-powered Ryzen processors accelerating features in their favorite suites, but the vast majority are looking for added value. For most users, AI acceleration is a solution to a problem that still needs to be solved. This is AMD Pervasive AI Developer Competition The announcement is significant. The competition aims to encourage developers to develop exciting AI applications. Something like this is usually not necessary when such workloads already exist in abundance.

AMD makes good laptop processors with powerful GPUs and now strong NPU integration. The latter makes the chips future-proof, but is not suitable for daily use in laptops Game changer at this time. If you take away the AI ​​capabilities, the Ryzen 8040 Mobile is primarily a re-release of the Ryzen 7040 Mobile. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t encourage enthusiasm either. We’ll wait for the benchmarks, but suspect that those looking for an AMD office laptop will find the best value for money in a device with Ryzen 7040 on board, with Ryzen 8040 just hitting the market has come.