AMD Ryzen Pro CPUs To Challenge Intel In The Enterprise Arena
Performance, security and machine learning optimisation can all be found in AMD’s latest processors
AMD has revealed Ryzen Pro, a family of central processing units (CPU) aimed at chips for professional and enterprise-graded workloads.
While AMD’s Zen-based architecture Ryzen CPUs have been released to the consumer and enthusiast market, the Ryzen Pro is the chip makers shot at Intel’s Core i processors aimed at the business market.
Ryzen Pro
Six Ryzen Pro processors. based on 14nm fabrication, are available, starting with the Ryzen 3 Pro 1200, which features four cores and the same number of threads with a maximum clock speed of 3.4Ghz, and ends with the Ryzen 7 Pro 1700X, an eight core chip with 16 threads and a boosted clock speed of 3.8Ghz.
The chips have been aimed at offering everything from general office productive workloads with the entry-level chips, through to software development, running 3D scientific applications and carrying out intense multitasking at on the top Ryzen Pro 7 CPUs.
Unsurprisingly, AMD is touting a suite of benchmark results that pretty much beat Intel’s range of Core i processors across the board. However, independent and more real-world testing will be required before any real judgements can be made on who wins in the performance stakes.
But AMD is championing more than just power for the Ryzen Pro family. Cyber security is high on the agenda, with AMD touting built-in AES 128-bit encryption for the Ryzen Pro range, with the ability to provide operating system and application independent DRAM level encryption while avoiding any serious impact to system performance.
A secure boot process is also on offer which AMD claims can stop threats before they have the opportunity to penetrate a targeted system; essentially AMD is aiming for cyber security at the silicon level rather than rely on operating systems and third-party software to do the heavy-lifting.
Alongside security, AMD uting time. also has its SenseMI technology built-into the Ryzen Pro chips, which provides processor level machine learning capabilities to ensure the chip works in the most efficient manner for the workloads it is processing.
The smart tech can from predict what level of processing power an application might need to learning users and application behaviour to preemptively fetch the data needed for a predicted task, thereby speeding up computing; it will also automatically scale up processor performance based on the cooling system a computer has.
“Today marks another important step in our journey to bring innovation and excitement back to the PC industry: the launch of our Ryzen Pro desktop CPUs that will bring disruptive levels of performance to the premium commercial market,” said Jim Anderson, general manager of AMD’s Computing and Graphics Group.
“Offering a significant leap in generational performance, leadership multi-threaded performance, and the first-ever 8-core,16-thread CPU for commercial-grade PCs, Ryzen Pro provides a portfolio of technology choices that meet the evolving needs of businesses today and tomorrow.”
Normally, such innovation claims could be dismissed as corporate bluster, but after a rather lacklustre time in the CPU market, AMD looks to have truly pulled an interesting processor architecture and family out of the bag, and could really challenge Intel in the CPU arena once more.
Quiz: How much do you know about supercomputing?
