Microsoft and AMD announce Windows 11 AI PCs running Ryzen 8000 PRO and Pluton

AMD is preparing to launch Ryzen 9000, Zen 5-based CPUs, later this year as chipset and firmware support is starting to gear up. While we await the arrival of those, currently, the company is beginning to unveil its AI PCs that were first reported about in December last year.

The company is announcing the Ryzen 8000 PRO SKUs for commercial PCs and Microsoft is quite excited about it too, and for two reasons. First up, these PCs will have the Pluton security processor built in, something which has been inside AMD chips since Ryzen 6000.

In case you may not be aware, Pluton was designed by Microsoft in order to provide additional chip-level security protection over TPM (Trusted Platform Module) since the latter is vulnerable to bus interface sniffing attacks.

The second reason is Copilot, which is nothing surprising considering we are seeing it inside all aspects of the Windows OS as well as other Microsoft products.

Ryzen 8000 PRO are essentially the enterprise variants of Ryzen 8000 series APUs launched last year and one of the highlights of the lineup is the improved AI performance. AMD has been including dedicated AI accelerators called NPU (Neural Processing Units) inside its processors since Ryzen 7000 mobile and the company promised that the Windows Task Manager would be able to track and report NPU usage soon.

Microsoft also claims up to 41% faster device deployment performance though we are not sure what the comparison is against. In its blog post, the tech giant writes:

AMD is expanding its commercial mobile and desktop AI PC portfolio with new AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series mobile processors and AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series desktop processors, which business pros will see on new laptops and desktops from AMD’s OEM partners. By leveraging the CPU, GPU and dedicated, on-chip NPU, new Ryzen AI-powered processors provide more trillions of operations per second (TOPS) than previous generations.

AMD PRO technologies help IT managers save time by enabling them to deploy devices up to 41% faster and manage them at scale with cloud-based tools, including Windows Autopilot.

In addition, the Microsoft Pluton security processor is integrated into the AMD Ryzen PRO processors, providing protection from the chip to the cloud. This helps safeguard user credentials, identities, personal data and encryption keys on Windows 11 PCs.

The full mobile Ryzen PRO lineup is given below:

The desktop lineup is given below:

Microsoft also mentions some of the other modern features of Ryzen 8000 PRO which include Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3, and DDR5 support, among others.