New computers are on the way with more performance, just in time for the new year, as AMD looks to deliver improvements in laptops with its chips.
The end of the year is literally in sight, and yet we’re already getting a taste of what the next year of computing will look like, as AMD offers a hint of what’s next.
And what is next, you ask? Performance and AI, it seems, as AMD looks to the next generation of its Ryzen chips in laptops, announced this week in the Ryzen 8040 series of chips.
A generation of processors poised to take on hardware from Intel’s Core range, AMD’s focus with its new Ryzen chips seems to be very much on artificial intelligence, with select models of the 8040 range including a Neural Processing Unit able to process AI directly on the hardware, much like how Apple’s A-series chips can in its phones, as can the Apple Silicon processors found in the MacBook, there since the M1 launched in 2020.
That’ll give AMD a way to compete with what Apple has in the MacBook range, though AMD will also be providing Ryzen AI software to help people deploy their own AI models on their AMD hardware.
Aside for the AI side of life, performance is also being improved, with faster video editing, 3D rendering, and some improvements to gaming performance, as well. The tech will use similar graphics processing tech to what we saw in the Asus ROG Ally, which used AMD’s Zen 4 processor technology in the Z1 chip, and makes an appearance in this range, as well.
There will requite a few versions, that said, with models offering performance for budgets in the Ryzen 3 84xx, mid-range in the Ryzen 5 86xx, and the Ryzen 7 and 9 delivering a whole lot more.
As it is, there aren’t a heap of new computers announced supporting the Ryzen 80xx chips yet, but Acer has one in the Nitro V 16, a gaming-focused laptop sporting a 16 inch screen, WiFi 6E, support for DTS:X in its speakers, AMD’s Ryzen 7 8845 in the 8040 series, and a discrete and dedicated graphics chip from Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series.
No word on pricing just yet, though, with Australian availability not expected until at least March or April 2024, which is also likely to be like the rest of the Ryzen 8040 range, as well.
