AMD kicks off Microsoft's 2024 dream of AI-powered Windows (12) with Ryzen 8040, 8050 series

At its Advancing AI presentation today, AMD made a ton of new announcements related to its upcoming products in the field of AI. While much of the talk was about enterprise-class hardware, AMD also revealed its new consumer Ryzen AI APUs as it introduced its new Ryzen 8040 series lineup.

The Ryzen 8040 series (codenamed "Hawk Point") succeeds the Ryzen 7040 series which was released earlier this year. Although this is the new 8000 series, AMD confirms that the processor is still Zen 4, though the performance of the NPU (neural processing unit), which is the dedicated AI processing hardware, should be up to 40% higher, thanks to the 60% throughput boost Hawk Point gets with its 16 TOPS (trillion operations per second) NPUs.

As you may notice in the image above, AMD also announced next-gen Strix Point (Ryzen 8050), which will debut next year with the more powerful XDNA 2 NPUs, and AMD claims they will offer up to three times the throughput of XDNA 1. And if you are familiar with AMD's naming, the Ryzen 8050 series should have Zen 5 cores under the hood, so the CPU part will get a boost as well.

This massive boost to AI processing power is being done with next-gen Windows in mind. A recent report suggested Microsoft is planning to launch the Windows 11 successor in June of 2024 alongside a slew of AI PCs. Neowin speculated that chips with dedicated AI processors could become a recommendation as Microsoft has clearly been expressing its desire to incorporate more robust AI features.

In the presentation today, Microsoft explained how next-gen Windows will blur the lines between cloud and client with the help of AMD hardware and also help power various AI-based Windows apps. The press release says:

AMD Ryzen 8040 processors are ready to leverage the full range of the Windows 11 ecosystem for optimized performance, including full support for Windows 11 security features. Select systems with an AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processor can also access out-of-the-box AI with Window Studio Effects Pack, enabling privacy at home or on-the-go with background blur, eye gaze tracking, and noise cancellation.

Here is the full Ryzen 8040 series lineup starting from the octa-core 8945HS all the way down to the quad-core 8440U:

You can watch the full presentation on AMD's YouTube channel.