Hawk Point comes to Ryzen PRO to fill out AMD’s 2024 commercial CPU portfolio.
There can’t really be any doubt at this point: AI is going to change all of our lives, and there’s no going back from here. Still, there’s quite a bit of debate over exactly how it’s going to happen. If you listen to hardware vendors like AMD and Intel, they’ll tell you that you absolutely need to upgrade your business’ computers to brand-new «AI PCs,» or PCs with built-in AI acceleration. That’s the goal of slides like this:
Whether you think generative AI is ready for prime time or not, there are plenty of salient arguments for the idea that it’s worth upgrading to the latest hardware. Just like always, the newest chips are fabricated on the most recent process technology and feature the latest core architectures from each vendor. In the case of AMD, that means Zen 4 CPU cores, RDNA 3 graphics, and «XDNA» Ryzen AI neural processing units, or NPUs.
As of today, AMD has a three-pronged approach to client CPUs for business users. At the top end are the Threadripper Pro 7000-series processors that we’ve already checked out a couple of times before. For folks who don’t need massive multi-core throughput, there are Ryzen PRO 8000-series desktop CPUs, and then for laptops we have the Ryzen PRO 8040 series mobile processors.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these parts are fundamentally the same hardware as the Ryzen 8000G desktop CPUs and Ryzen 8040 series mobile CPUs that both came out earlier this year. All of these parts are based on «Hawk Point» silicon, but the PRO versions of these processors do offer a few extra features over the standard models. We’ll talk about those toward the end. First, let’s take a look at these chips.
On the mobile side of things, we have parts ranging from the Ryzen 9 PRO 8945HS all the way down to the Ryzen 5 PRO 8540U. All of the HS parts with a model number ending in «45» have configurable TDPs between 35 and 54 watts, while the «40HS» parts range between 20 and 28 watts. Meanwhile, the «U» parts have the usual 15-28W TDP range. All of this is configurable by the system vendor, of course.
As the Hawk Point silicon only has eight CPU cores in a single CCX, there’s not really that much to differentiate these parts. The Ryzen 5 PRO 8540U misses out on the Ryzen AI NPU, and it’s likely that some of these parts have taken hits to the potency of their GPU hardware, but if so, AMD doesn’t specify in its materials today.
