AMD Announces The Ryzen 8040 Series Mobile Processors With Better Ryzen AI

In addition to AMD using its AI event today for launching the Instinct MI300A and MI300X along with ROCm 6.0, AMD also announced the Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors. A big emphasis with these forthcoming laptop processors is on the AI capabilities between the dedicated NPU with AMD XDNA, Zen 4 CPU cores with AVX-512 VNNI support, and AMD RDNA3 graphics capable of accelerating AI.

AMD originally introduced Ryzen AI with the XDNA NPU with the Ryzen 7040 series while the Ryzen 8040 series will bring their second-generation Ryzen AI wares.

AMD is also working on helping further along the Ryzen AI software story.

An increasing number of Microsoft Windows programs have been adding support for Ryzen AI, in part through the Microsoft ONNX Runtime. As written about in October, AMD has been evaluating Ryzen AI support for Linux.

When briefed in advance of today's AMD AI event, I asked about any update on the Linux support... To which I was told PyTorch and Tensorflow work on Linux. Of course. But whether Ryzen AI is actually being enabled on Linux, isn't clear. I don't have a straight answer yet, AMD's GitHub tracking ticket remains open, and I haven't been explicitly told about Ryzen AI support for Linux besides acknowledging PyTorch and TensorFlow work on Linux. And, yes, ONNX Runtime works on Linux too.

It's likely only a matter of time before Ryzen AI is officially supported on Linux, especially with Ryzen AI to eventually appear on Ryzen embedded hardware for edge/smart computing and other scenarios where Linux is more common than just on the desktop/laptops with Windows.

With the new Ryzen 8040 series processors, Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics are still being used but with upgraded XDNA NPU capabilities. AMD is citing around 1.4x improvements in AI performance for cases like Llama 2 and vision models.

While Intel has indicated all their Meteor Lake SKUs will feature their neural processing unit (NPU), the Ryzen 8040 series is leaving the bottom-end Ryzen 5 8540U and Ryzen 3 8440U SKUs without the NPU.

The AMD Ryzen 8040 series will be available in Q1 2024 with 16 NPU TOPS and 39 total TOPS, up from 10 NPU TOPS and 33 total TOPS with the current Ryzen 7040 series. AMD also reaffirmed their "Strix Point" APUs with next-gen Ryzen AI support coming in 2024.

With Strix Point APUs with XDNA 2, AMD is teasing more than 3x generative AI performance.

Those were the brief highlights on the AMD Ryzen 8040 series shared today for this AI-heavy event. Hopefully we do end up seeing firm Ryzen AI Linux support in 2024.