AMD serves up Ryzen 8040: well-known laptop CPUs marinated in AI sauce

AMD launches new processors for the laptop. AMD Ryzen 8040 mobile does not involve any architectural leaps, but mainly works its way into the spotlight thanks to AI acceleration.

AMD introduces Ryzen 8040 mobile. Anyone who knows AMD’s eccentric naming conventions for Ryzen chips will immediately see from the name that we should not expect any major technological leaps forward from the new chip series. The thousand in the series name has nothing to do with the node or the architecture of the CPUs, but merely refers to the launch year. ‘7’ means 2023, ‘8’ 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’ illustrates that these new processors are built with the Zen 4 architecture, just like Ryzen 7040 last year. On the CPU side, we should therefore not expect any major innovations compared to last year. AMD today launches an expanded lineup 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 wafer-thin laptops. The maximum clock frequency is in line with previous editions of Ryzen mobile.

The changes are also limited on the graphic side. The Radeon 780M chiplet is still the most powerful GPU chiplet available. It performs better than the built-in GPU of the competition, which AMD cheerfully compared at its launch. Major improvements of Ryzen 8040 mobile compared to Ryzen 7040 mobile are also not forthcoming.

AI

Are there no news, except the launch year? Fortunately, the majority of newly announced processors come with an NPU chiplet. AMD fully opted for AI acceleration with the launch of Ryzen Pro 7040 mobile six months ago, and is now extending NPU integration to almost the entire 8040 lineup. The current NPU in Ryzen 8040 – Hawk Point – follows the Phoenix-NPU in the previous generation of chips. The new NPU moves 39 TOPS (Tensor Operations per Second), compared to the previous 33 TOPS.

AMD goes further and speaks of 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, which AMD is clarifying. Already today, there are more than a hundred AI-powered experiences available for Windows computers, accelerated by the NPUs in the 8040 series. AMD refers to individual functions, which mainly come from Adome and competitor Black Magic. For example, DaVnci Resolve contains nineteen features that can benefit from the NPU, Photoshop has 23, provided you count all variations of the Neural Filter separately.

AMD further emphasizes how the chips easily support different 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-driven features for voice or gesture recognition, digital assistants that can handle natural language and more. Accelerating such workloads via the NPU makes them run faster, keeps the CPU unloaded, and reduces battery consumption.

That all sounds well and good, but let’s be honest: this is still largely in the future. Creative professionals may already be looking forward to AI-driven Ryzen processors that will accelerate functions in their favorite suites, but for the vast majority they are looking for added value. For most users, AI acceleration is a solution to a problem that has yet to be addressed. That AMD the Pervasive AI Developers Contest writing out is indicative. The competition should encourage developers to build exciting AI applications. Such a thing is usually not necessary when such workloads already exist in abundance.

AMD makes good laptop processors with powerful GPUs and now also 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, Ryzen 8040 mobile is mainly a re-release of Ryzen 7040 mobile. There is nothing wrong with that, but neither does it encourage enthusiasm. We will wait for the benchmarks, but suspect that those looking for an AMD office laptop may find the best value for money in a device with Ryzen 7040 on board when Ryzen 8040 has just been launched.