When it comes to notebook processors, the chip designer AMD claims to have made a big splash.The company presented a chip at the CES industry trade fair with which the x86 class should finally be able to compete seriously against Apple's M series.
According to the company, the AMD Ryzen 7040 series chips are "ultra-thin" processors based on a 4nm process.
At the presentation, CEO Lisa Su explained that the chips work up to 30 percent faster than the M1 Pro from Apple.
Apple also wants to outperform in various specific tasks - it is around 34 percent faster than the M1 Pro in multiprocessing workloads and 20 percent faster than the M2 in AI calculations.
The top product of the series is the Ryzen 9 7940HS, which works with eight cores, 16 threads, and a boost speed of 5.2 GHz. In addition, the Ryzen AI has its own unit for AI calculations, which should not only work faster than Apple's comparison piece but also be 50 percent more energy-efficient.
Available from March
In general, you want to outperform the competing product based on ARM cores in terms of power consumption. AMD said that the chip can be used to build ultra-thin notebooks that can play videos for more than 30 hours on one battery charge.
Of course, it remains to be seen how well independent tests rate the new chips. The first notebooks in which the Ryzen 7040 series is installed are expected to be available in March. Then the M1 Pro is already a year old.
There are also no comparisons with the most powerful Apple chip, the M1 Max, and the coming generations are already in the works.In this respect, it seems that AMD is making good progress, but not in such a way that the competitor is easily left behind.