After several weeks of leaks and benchmarks, today AMD has officially announced the APU for pre-built low-power Ryzen 8040 laptops and desktop systems. At the Advancing AI event, AMD has revealed its renewed line of Zen 4 CPU for mobile focused on delivering improved AI performance.
This range will incorporate CPUs with Zen 4 architecture cores and integrated graphics RDNA 3. These chips will be codenamed “Hawk Point” and will arrive in early 2024 under the 8040 series branding. They will replace the Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” of 2023, and while they will be almost the same, the big change is that the 8040 chips will offer improved XDNA AI performance.
AMD's new 8040 APUs will focus on having better performance for Artificial Intelligence
According to AMD these Ryzen 8040 can run AI applications on the device much faster than their predecessors. They say they are up to 40% faster when running a chatbot like Llama 2 and image identification programs like ResNet 50. They can reach 39 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS), compared to 33 TOPS for their Phoenix APUs. This offloading of AI tasks to a neural processing unit (NPU) frees up the main CPU cores for other tasks. This is a movement very similar to the one that Intel is going to have with the meteor lake and its VPU for Artificial Intelligence processes.
They compared the 8040 to Intel's current 13th generation mobile CPUs, showing that AMD's new CPUs They are faster in creating content, gaming, and multi-threaded performance. But in a few weeks, the next Meteor Lake CPUs will start arriving, which are also aimed at “AI PCs.”
It will be when both new series of APUs for laptops arrive that we will see if Intel or AMD wins in this duel to win the hearts of Artificial Intelligence fans. Furthermore, it will be necessary to see if this passion is maintained or deflated.
