Latest AMD Ryzen Pro chips are similar silicon, more smarts

AMD has brought its 4 nm Hawk Point and Phoenix APUs to business users in the form of the Ryzen Pro 8040 series for laptops and Ryzen Pro 8000 series for desktops.

As with previous iterations of Ryzen Pro, the APUs come with business-focused features, primarily better security options and remote management. A new generation of Ryzen Pro usually comes with fresh enterprise features and/or new hardware, but that's not quite the case with the 8040 or the 8000 series.

The Hawk Point architecture inside the Ryzen Pro 8040 series is actually nearly identical to the outgoing Phoenix arch that powered the Ryzen Pro 7040 series. It uses the same TSMC 4 nm process, and nothing with respect to core count or frequency has changed for the CPU cores and integrated GPU. The single notable difference is the faster XDNA neural processing unit (NPU), which can hit 16 ...