AMD Ryzen Pro 6000 Promises Speed Boost And Less Battery Drain
The company’s new business class offerings boast up to eight cores for high-powered computing without the normal battery drain associated with power-hungry tasks like video streaming and conferencing.
AMD on Tuesday launched its Ryzen Pro 6000 line of CPUs for high-powered business computing tasks, claiming better performance than rival Intel’s Alder Lake chips and saying channel partners can count on a steady stream of available product despite current supply chain conditions.
The new chips are AMD’s solution to power commercial notebooks and the company says the processors offer faster speeds and better power consumption.
“Our users and customers don’t have to make a choice between high performance and battery life,” said Matt Unangst, senior director of AMD’s commercial client and workstation business, during a press briefing. “We’re delivering both and we’re the only one in the market that is able to do that today.”
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The new CPUs support up to eight cores and achieve speeds up to 3.3GHz. For solution providers, offering PC notebooks with the latest and greatest AMD chips may help provide a selling point as the PC market overall begins to soften after two years of record growth. Unangst said AMD remains committed to the channel.
“AMD continues to make substantial investments to ensure that we are able to ramp our supply in partnership with our OEMs,” Unangst said in response to a question from CRN. “I’m very confident that you’re going to see many of these platforms available not only to the enterprise customers but also in the channel markets, especially as we work through the balance of this year. I’m very confident in the future of that business.”
The new chips will power laptops from HP, Lenovo and other manufacturers sometime during the second quarter. The Ryzen Pro 6000 line is broken into two series: The H-series for higher end laptops and U-series for thinner and generally less powerful machines. There are eight chips altogether with varying degrees of performance.
The processors feature AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics, which the company says boosts the line’s graphics capabilities by 50 percent to 110 percent over last year’s Ryzen Pro 5000 series. The Ryzen Pro 6000 series also features improved power consumption – the company compared the new chip to last year’s model and showed the Ryzen 7 6800U uses up to 35 percent less power for video conferencing and up to 17 percent less power for web browing.
Mike Turicchi, vice president of marketing at NCS Technologies in Gainesville, Va., said having chipmakers compete is a plus for solution providers. With chip shortages and new COVID shutdowns affecting supply chain and causing production backlogs, new CPU offerings may be a silver lining.
“We are excited about AMD’s performance and efficiency advancements in the new Ryzen Pro 6000 series. It’s important to have competition in the industry driving innovation in chip designs,” he said. “AMD’s efficiency gains in the 6000 series raises the bar for all chip manufacturers. At the end of the day, it’s the consumer who benefits with longer battery life and better performance.”
AMD’s Unangst added, “These platforms represent the best-in-class in our commercial notebook portfolio powered by AMD… AMD has made substantial investments and grown in critical spaces in of the market, with Chromebooks, commercial notebooks and desktops.”