Last year was huge for AMD. The company launched two new architectures, Zen 3+ and Zen 4, with the latter becoming available to users through the Ryzen 7000-series CPUs on both desktops and laptops. The chips themselves represented a huge improvement from their predecessor, with clock speeds going up to a whopping 5.7 GHz. Now, AMD is launching the new Ryzen 8000 CPUs, although they’re probably not as big of a change as you’re expecting.
AMD just took to its big AI-focused event to launch its Ryzen 8000 lineup of CPUs. With these chips, AMD is promising “best-in-class x86 processor performance,” but the best way to think of these is to see them as souped-up versions of the company’s previous Ryzen 7040-series chips. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as Zen 4 is only one year old and it’s still a very fresh architecture, but it’s definitely a lesser upgrade compared to other releases.
As for the chips themselves, the lineup starts with the quad-core Ryzen 3 8440U, which has 12MB of total cache, a 28W TDP, and clock speeds that can go up to 4.7 GHz. The best chip in this series is the Ryzen 9 8945HS, which comes with eight cores clocking up to 5.2 GHz as well as 24MB of total cache and a TDP of around 45W. Silicon-wise, they’re not really upgrades compared to previous chips. The Ryzen 9 8945HS, in particular, seems to have the same specs as the Ryzen 9 7940HS.
So whatisdifferent, then? For starters, AMD is touting a Ryzen AI NPU built right into the chips' die, which will likely come in handy as AI becomes bigger in our operating system. Windows, in particular,is rumoredto be coming with a new major release soon that will have some on-device AI features that will likely require a dedicated NPU, and this could come in handy for that. Other than that, there’s not a lot to be seen here. As with the Ryzen 7000 APUs, there are RDNA 3 graphics and Zen 4 cores, and there’s not a lot changing otherwise.
Laptops coming with Ryzen 8000 CPUs are coming next year, and some, likethis one from Acer, have already been announced.
