The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, along with the associated lockdowns and working/learning from home has changed pretty much everything, and that also includes processors. Tuesday, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) unveiled new Ryzen PRO 5000 Series mobile processors, its competitor to Intel’s vPro platform, and the chipmaker is pitching them at professionals who are spending more time in front of notebooks running Zoom and apps from office suites.
According to information supplied by AMD, there’s been a massive growth in commercial notebooks, showing a 3x growth in platform designs, and more than double share growth since 2018. Some of that driven by a shift away from desktops, but a lot has also been driven by COVID. The company claims the chips, based on the same Zen 3 architecture as most of its consumer-focused Ryzen 5000 series, will provide “uncompromised performance and battery life” for thin-and-light business laptops. They’ll appear in a slate of business notebooks including Elitebooks, ProBooks, ThinkPads, and ThinkBooks throughout this year.
The new normal has bought with it new challenges, in the form of a changing productivity landscape, new security challenges, and a massive increase in remote working and collaboration.
On paper, the chips look pretty similar to their Ryzen 5000 counterparts. The headliner is the Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U, with eight cores, 16 threads, 20MB cache, and base frequency of 1.9 GHz with boost up to 4.4 GHz. AMD’s Ryzen line currently contains the only processors for thin-and-light laptops that use “eight high-performing cores.” Intel’s Tiger Lake vPro line is all quad-core at the moment (though its H-series has an eight-core chip on the way, and that line does appear in ultraportables from time to time) and Apple’s M1 chip uses a combination of high-power and high-efficiency cores.
The line also includes the Ryzen 5 Pro 5650U (six cores, 12 threads) and the Ryzen 3 Pro 5450U (four cores, eight threads). The three chips are identical in specs to the Ryzen 7 5800U, Ryzen 5 5600U, and the Ryzen 3 5400U, respectively; all have 15W TDP. We’ll be testing a 5800U system shortly and will have a better sense of how these chips will perform after that.
What the new chips have to offer businesses specifically are some new security features. They include a new Shadow Stack (here’s an explainer if you’re curious) designed to protect against malware attacks. AMD says the chips also include “deep integration with Microsoft and OEMs” for better security, and that PCs will have FIPS encryption certification.
The chips also include AMD’s Pro Manageability platform, which is AMD’s competitor to Intel’s Active Management Technology, and include “full spectrum manageability features.” As the Ryzen Pro 4000 series did, the 5000 line supports Microsoft’s Endpoint Manager, a platform for IT workers to manage PCs, servers, and other devices in their organization.
