AMD announces its Ryzen PRO 5000 processors for business PCs

AMD Ryzen PRO processor with keys weirdly floating above it

Today, AMD is announcing its latest Ryzen PRO processors, which are from the Ryzen 5000 series. Essentially, they're the best chips from the Ryzen 5000 series, but with extra hardware-based security goodies baked into them for business PCs. It's the AMD version of Intel's vPro.

Just like last year, there are three chips, and just like last year, they all have simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Of course, all Ryzen 5000 processors have SMT this time around, although they're not all built on the Zen 3 architecture, so it's worth noting that the Ryzen PRO 5000 processors are based on the Zen 3 versions of each chip.

They include the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, the Ryzen 5 PRO 5650U, and the Ryzen 3 PRO 5450U, coming in at eight, six, and four cores, respectively. They're all built on a 7nm node with a 15W TSP, and both clock speed and cache are the same as the non-PRO versions of the chips.

Table of AMD Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen PRO 5000 chips

In benchmarks, AMD compared both the 15W Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and the 15W Ryzen 5 PRO 5650U to the best that Intel had to offer, the 28W Core i7-1185G7, and the results are impressive. Starting with the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, it lost by 3% on single-thread (note the difference in TDP though), but was ahead by 65% on Cinebench multi-thread, ahead by 65% on Passmark 10 CPU Mark, and ahead by 48% on Geekbench multi-core. It also beat Intel's offering in productivity tests, using apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Edge, and PCMark 10 tests.

And even though you'd expect a Ryzen 5 to go head to head with a Core i5, AMD still put the Ryzen 5 PRO 5650U against the 28W Core i7-1185G7, and AMD still came out on top, at least in the tests that it chose to show. It came out ahead on Passmark by 26%, ahead in Geekbench 5 multi-core by 26%, ahead in PCMark 10 apps by 4%, and ahead in the PCMark 10 benchmark by 20%.

But of course, we went through all of the performance stuff when AMD Ryzen 5000 was first announced. A key part of the story here is security and manageability. One of the new security features is called AMD Shadow Stack, which is meant to mitigate malware attacks on the hardware level. AMD is also promising deep integration with Microsoft for the Secured Core PC program. It's also certified for government FIPS encryption.

AMD is promising 18 months of software stability, and 24 months of planned availability of the new processors. The longer these things are, the more businesses can standardize around it.

The first AMD Ryzen PRO 5000 laptops are coming from HP and Lenovo. From HP's end, it's the EliteBook 845 G8, the ProBook Aero 635 G2, and the ProBook x360 435 G8. From Lenovo, it's the ThinkPad T14s, the ThinkBook 16p, and the ThinkBook 14s.