AMD Extends Ryzen 7000 Range To Enterprise With Pro Chips

AMD has unveiled additions to the Ryzen 7000 processor family, targeting business desktops and laptops with promises of increases in performance, security and management features, plus the inevitable AI capabilities.

The new Ryzen Pro line comprises the Ryzen Pro 7000 Series for desktop systems, and the Ryzen Pro 7040 Series is for laptops and mobile workstations, the latter featuring the Ryzen AI engine based on technology AMD gained from its purchase of Xilinx.

Like the Ryzen 7000 products announced earlier this year, all these new chips are based on AMD's latest Zen 4 core design, but also includes the company's AMD Pro features for business buyers, which includes built-in security, deployment and management capabilities.

AMD's senior director for Commercial Client and Workstation, Matthew Unangst, said users want all-day battery life on laptops and the IT department is looking for products with longer lifecycles and lower energy consumption.

Naturally, these are the areas that AMD is claiming to address with the new Ryzen Pro products.

On the mobile side, the Ryzen Pro 7040 Series features up to 8 CPU cores, with clock speeds up to 5.2GHz. The lineup is divided into those with a "HS" suffix offering "leadership performance" and those with a "U" suffix, offering "uncompromised capability," with the difference being that the former have a 35-54W TDP, while the latter are designed for 15-28W.

Not surprisingly, AMD showed charts to indicate that the top "U" chip, the Ryzen Pro 7840U offered both better performance and battery life than rival Intel parts, claiming it is competitive against higher power "P Series" Core chips with an average 17 percent increase in performance.

However, there is a new rival in AMD's sights, and on battery life the company is not only claiming its new chips beat Intel, but also the M2 Pro chip in some of Apple's MacBooks. When running a Microsoft Teams session, AMD claims that in tests, its laptop lasted for 6 hours 48 minutes, compared with 6 hours 13 for the Apple system. Pity the testers.

The Ryzen Pro 7040 chips also have AMD's RDNA 3 integrated graphics, while select models feature the Ryzen AI engine, which is apparently used to deliver effects such as background blurring and autoframing on conference calls, but which is also expected to be used for other features like accelerating analytics in future.

Laptops expected to feature the new mobile chips are the HP EliteBook line and Lenovo ThinkPad Z13/Z16, according to AMD.

For the desktop, the Ryzen Pro 7000 Series chips feature up to 12 Zen 4 CPU cores, but it appears there are only three skus being announced today; the Pro 7945 has 12 cores at 5.4GHz, the Pro 7745 has 8 cores at 5.3GHz, and the Pro 7645 has 6 cores at 5.1GHz.

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Unlike in the case of the mobile processors, AMD is only comparing itself with Intel on the desktop, claiming the new parts are up to 48 percent faster than a 13th Gen Core i5-13400, and up to 45 percent faster than the previous generation of its own chips.

These chips feature AMD RDNA 2 integrated graphics and use AMD’s Socket AM5 infrastructure, which the company said it intends to support through 2025.

The AMD Pro capabilities have also been extended. AMD Memory Guard offers memory encryption to protect sensitive data if a PC is lost or stolen, plus cloud-based remote management capabilities via support for tools such as Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Endpoint Manager, the company said.

With these Ryzen Pro additions, AMD is delivering "features that our enterprise customers are looking for," Unangst claimed. ®