On December 7th, AMD held a "advancing AI" conference on Wednesday local time, in addition to the release of the MI300 series AI accelerator, it also released the Ryzen 8040 series APU, codenamed "Hawk Point", which is a processor designed for client and consumer PCs, mainly for the laptop market, of which the high-end version can be oriented to AI PC.
The AMD Ryzen 8040 series is equipped with the same 4nm zen 4 CPU core architecture as the previous generation, with up to 8 cores and 16 threads, but the clock speed has been increased to 52 ghzï¼›With the same RDNA 3 graphics core architecture, up to Radeon 780M IGPU (12 compute units);The XDNA NPU has been upgraded to have 16 tops of AI computing power, and the AI performance has been improved by 60% compared with the previous generation. The TDP range is 15-54W. PC products will be available in the first quarter of 2024.
The product line is divided into three main segments, starting with the high-end Ryzen 8045HS series, which will be the best with the highest clock speeds, followed by the more mainstream Ryzen 8040HS series, and the entry-level Ryzen 8040U series, which is designed for power-optimized platforms.
Specifically, the AMD Hawk Point series has a total of 9 Ryzen 8040 SKUs. The first is the Ryzen 8045HS SKU, which includes the Ryzen 9 8945HS, Ryzen 7 8845HS, and Ryzen 5 8645HS. These three chips have the same specs as the Ryzen 9 7940HS, Ryzen 7 7840HS, and Ryzen 5 7640HS SKUs, up to 8 6 cores, Radeon 780M 760M IGPU, up to 52 GHz clock speed, 16 MB total L3 cache, and 35- 54W TDP.
AMD Ryzen 8040HS SKUs, mainly Ryzen 7 8840HS and Ryzen 5 8640HS. The two SKUs are designed to be low-power products with a target power of 20-30W. The Ryzen 7 8840HS APU has 8 cores, 16 threads, 16 MB cache, Radeon 780M IGPU, and clock speeds up to 51 GHz, while the Ryzen 5 8640HS APU has 6 cores, 12 threads, 16 MB ** cache, Radeon 760M IGPU, and up to 49 GHz clock. These chips will come with a lower base clock and have an additional thermal power limit to meet the requirements of a power-constrained PC.
Finally, the AMD Ryzen 8040U SKU, whose configuration is again the same as the Ryzen 7040U SKU. There are four SKUs, including the Ryzen 7 8840U, Ryzen 5 8640U, Ryzen 5 8540U, and Ryzen 3 8440U. The 8540U and 8440U lack NPUs because they are based on smaller hybrid chips that contain ZEN 4 and ZEN 4C cores. These low-power solutions do not include a dedicated XDNA NPU. These SKUs only come with a Radeon 740M IGPU with 4 compute units.
When it comes to the advantages of using smaller Zen 4C cores, one of the most obvious is the smaller chip size, which can lead to higher density and higher power efficiency. AMD says that Zen 4C core provides:
Higher efficiency: Smaller cores with the same IPC can use less power to deliver higher performance below 15W.
Scalability of the Advanced Edition: Smaller cores with the same IPC open up the potential for future increases in the number of cores in the high-end market.
Entry-level scalability: Smaller cores with the same IPC allow AMD to offer consumers more options.
One of the main goals of the new AMD Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" APU series is to attract buyers into the AI PC ecosystem. The upcoming Windows version, Windows 12, is expected to be a big deal when it comes to artificial intelligence, and rumors have highlighted that one of the main requirements will be to have a dedicated NPU that is top enough to handle the AI processing capabilities of the new operating system.
As a result, AMD has upgraded the NPUs on these new APUs to deliver up to 16 tops of AI compute power. AMD itself claims a 40% performance improvement for the Ryzen 8040 series using the LLAMA 2 and Vision models. AMD is also working to fine-tune its ML and AI performance with various improvements to the driver and Ryzen AI software suite.
It is worth noting that Intel will soon officially release the new Core Ultral processor for AI PCs on December 14, local time in the United States. And before that, Qualcomm has also launched the Snapdragon X Elite processor for AI PCs.
According to the latest ** from market research agency Canalys, personal computer (PC) shipments are expected to increase by 8% year-on-year to 26.7 billion units. Among them, AI PC will be one of the growth drivers, and the proportion of AI PC will reach 19% in 2024, and the shipment will exceed 5,000 units.
Editor: Xinzhixun-Rogue Sword.