Last January, AMD jumped ahead of Intel with the release of its Ryzen 7040 chips, the first x86 processors with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI workloads. Competing Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake chips with NPU should arrive on December 14. But AMD once again reminded Intel of the lag and announced the Ryzen 8040, the next generation of laptop processors with artificial intelligence.
According to AMD, the Ryzen 8040, led by the 8-core Ryzen 9 8945HS, is 1.4 times faster than its predecessors when it comes to the performance of Llama 2 and other artificial intelligence models, reports Engadget. They are also reported to be 1.8 times faster than the Intel 13900H in gaming and 1.4 times faster in content creation.
Like Intel, AMD is also pushing developers to build NPU features into their applications and has introduced the Ryzen AI Software platform, which will allow developers to take pre-trained AI models and optimize them to run on Ryzen AI hardware.
One of the first AMD Ryzen 8040 products will be the Acer Nitro V16. The processor is said to have enough power for modern gaming applications, and the artificial intelligence technology provides improved rendering with ray tracing.
It can be purchased with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics accelerator, which supports DLSS 3.5 technology and its own ray tracing function based on artificial intelligence, called Ray Reconstruction. You can choose between two display options with WQXGA or WUXGA resolution. Both variants have a refresh rate of 165 Hz and a response time of 3 ms.
You can order up to 32GB of DRR55600 RAM and a 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. The Windows 11 gaming laptop will be available in March for $1,000 for the base model. A monthly Xbox Game Pass is promised as a gift.
