Chip designer AMD is making its biggest play yet for Intel’s dominance in commercial laptops with the launch of its new Ryzen Pro 4000 processors that come with new enterprise management and security features.
The company has announced the launch of the four-core Ryzen 3 Pro 4450U, six-core Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U and eight-core Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U, promising better performance, up to 20 hours or more of battery life and new manageability and security features that increase the competition for Intel’s enterprise-level vPro processors.
The new 15-watt processors, which are designed for ultra-thin commercial laptops, are an extension of AMD’s Ryzen 4000 family that launched earlier this year with the U-series for ultra-thin consumer and small business laptops and the H-series for gaming laptops. They are based on the same 7-nanometer Zen 2 architecture that has allowed AMD to claim big performance and efficiency gains over Intel in desktop PCs and servers, and those claims aren’t stopping with the Ryzen Pro 4000 series.
Matthew Unangst, director of AMD’s commercial client business, said the Ryzen Pro 4000 series defines a “new standard for modern business PCs,” addressing key IT challenges while also providing the level of performance and energy efficiency needed to maximise productivity in the workforce.
“It’s critical that our products and our platforms deliver the technology that helps our IT decision makers manage their business,” Unangst said.
Between the Ryzen 4000 U-series for small- to medium-sized businesses and the Ryzen Pro 4000 series for enterprises, Unangst said AMD expects 70 or more commercial laptops to come out this year from OEMs, including HP Inc. and Lenovo. Lenovo’s Ryzen Pro 4000 laptops include the ThinkPad T14 Gen 1, Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 1 and ThinkPad L15 Gen 1.
In comparison with Intel’s six-core Core i7-10710U, AMD claims that its flagship eight-core Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U provides anywhere from a 9-33% improvement in performance across several benchmarks, including in multi-threaded performance, while it dips by 2% for the single-threaded Cinebench 1T test, which Unangst said narrows the previous gap AMD had in that area.
However, he added, AMD’s mid-range six-core Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U can compete with Intel’s Core i7-10510U, offering anywhere from an 8-36 percent performance improvement across four benchmarks while showing 3 percent lower performance in the PCMark 10 Productivity test.
“What you can see here is that our Ryzen 5 part going head-to-head is highly competitive and in most of these cases actually delivers a leadership performance capability versus the Core i7,” Unangst said. “This is really raising the bar on the expectations around performance.”
The Ryzen 3, 5 and 7 Pro processors share some common specifications with their U-series counterparts. For instance, the Ryzen 7 Pro 4570U and Ryzen 7 4800U both have eight cores, 16 threads and a 12MB cache. However, for instance, the Ryzen 7 Pro has slightly lower clock speeds of up to 4.1GHz on the boost side and 1.7Ghz for base as well as seven graphics cores and a 1600Mhz graphics frequency.