Ryzen PRO 8000 Nudges Enterprises Toward AI PC

Chipmakers and enterprise software providers such as Microsoft continue to trumpet the virtue of packing more artificial intelligence (AI) into PCs to boost productivity, automation, security, and overall performance. AMD’s latest series of processors for the enterprise market, the Ryzen PRO 8000 series, offers an upgraded AI engine that improves AI acceleration for businesses and professional users.

In the PC realm—as just about everywhere else—AI today has as much to do with marketing as it does technology, and the term “AI PC” is more hype than reality. But the AI capability that AMD and other chipmakers are putting into processors does offer tangible user benefits that will increase over time. This may be particularly true in the enterprise world, where businesses and organizations can improve security by handling AI workloads locally rather than risk sending sensitive data to the cloud.

As is typical for AMD, the Ryzen PRO 8000 series processors are essentially enhanced versions of standard Ryzen 8000G processors with additional features that add security, manageability, and stability. They make available to business users features already rolled out to the consumer market, including the dedicated AI engine that AMD began including in some laptop processor models in 2023 and some desktop PC processors earlier this year.

The Ryzen PRO 8000 series includes the first enterprise-class desktop PC processors with a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU), following the path it blazed last year in the notebook space with the launch of the Ryzen PRO 7040 devices (MPR Jan 2023, “AMD Phoenix Delivers AI to Notebook PCs”). The flagship Ryzen PRO 8000 devices offer up to 39 TOPS of compute acceleration, an increase of 60% compared to last year’s parts. The NPU is alone is capable of 16 TOPS.