AMD to Power Business Laptops With New Ryzen, Athlon Pro Chips

AMD's newest chip lineup promises to give business laptops up to 12 hours of battery life and a boost in graphics processing power.

The company's second-generation Ryzen Pro and Athlon Pro mobile processors, announced today, are built with Radeon Vega graphics technology. The four chips are slated to arrive in commercial notebooks starting this quarter from vendors including HP and Lenovo.

The lineup starts with the AMD Athlon Pro 300U, which will likely be packed inside lower-tier laptops. It features two cores, support for up to four processing threads, and on-chip Radeon Vega 3 graphics silicon. The 300U will run at a 2.4GHz base clock speed.

The three other chips are all quad-core and fall under the Ryzen Pro 3000 series, and scale up to offer additional threads, higher clock speeds, and more graphics cores. All four chips are being fabricated on a 12-nanometer manufacturing process.

According to AMD's benchmarks, the processors match or slightly exceed the CPU processing found in competing Intel chips. In addition, the processors dwarf Intel's silicon when it comes to 3D modeling and video editing, thanks to Radeon Vega graphics inside.

Of course, AMD's benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt. But expect the new silicon to arrive in premium-looking, thin-and-light laptop designs that'll compete against Intel-powered notebooks. AMD's goal with the new processors is to create enterprise-friendly hardware that can last a whole workday on one charge and power through intense workloads.

The Radeon Vega graphics inside AMD's processors will also enable the laptops to support up to four 1080p external displays or up to two 4K displays. For better security, the AMD processors will offer full memory encryption to address the risk of cold boot attacks, or when someone tries to access the PC's memory when it's asleep.

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