We haven’t even gotten close to peak AI anything, but you won’t be able to buy a new laptop next year without seeing it everywhere, notable in its absence as well as its presence. That’s because the business interests of everybody who wants to sell you hardware or software are in complete alignment, which will result in a gravitational pull we can’t escape. AMD on Wednesday jumped in that line with its new Ryzen 8040 series of mobile processors at its Advancing AI event.
On-chip AI acceleration is critical for mobile devices, because it ameliorates the battery-killing nature of continual AI processing, which is far more cost-effective and environmentally better to perform locally than in the cloud — data centers to support consumer AI use are a black hole of energy usage and expensive to run. The accelerators are dedicated to iterating through and managing memory for the results of the vector calculations of small, pretrained models running on the device.
All the primary computer manufacturers now include a neural processing unit tile on its flagship processor’s die. AMD added it with its Ryzen 7040 series, Qualcomm rolled out its Snapdragon Elite in October, Intel announced it as part of the new Meteor Lake architecture (its first chips with the accelerator are rumored to debut next week) and Apple made its Neural Engine a central part of its M series architecture from the start.Â
In parallel with its GPU capabilities, branded RDNA, AMD refers to its NPU’s capabilities XDNA. The Ryzen 7040 series (Phoenix) included the first generation of the NPU. The mobile processors AMD announced Wednesday for its Ryzen 8040 series (Hawk Point) uses the same NPU architecture but offers better performance. AMD rates Phoenix at 10 trillion operations per second (by the NPU alone), while it says Hawk Point delivers 16 TOPS.
Ryzen 8040 series mobile CPUs
Max boost (GHz) | Cores | Threads | NPU | Power class | Integrated graphics | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ryzen 9 8945HS | 5.2 | 8 | 16 | Yes | 35-54W | Radeon 780M |
Ryzen 7 8845HS |
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