AMD Ryzen Pro 5000 Series processors with Zen 3 architecture offer significant performance, portability and productivity gains for mobile devices. BizTech recently spoke with Jimmy Holbert, channel business development director for AMD’s commercial client PC business, to find out what sets AMD Ryzen apart from the competition.
BIZTECH: How can Ryzen 5000 Series processors boost business performance?
We started the development process five or six years ago, when we noticed the general trend of where processors were going. At the beginning of 2020, we came out with the Zen 2 AMD Ryzen Pro 4000 Series, and this year we launched the new AMD Ryzen Pro 5000 series processors.
As far as performance, one of the key things we stepped into is the 7-nanometer space. This allows us to put a lot more technology into a smaller space, which is better for both performance and efficiency, and which means you don’t have to compromise battery life for performance. One of the big things that we’ve also pushed with the latest Ryzen 4000 Pro and 5000 Pro Series processors is the 8-core, 16-thread model. With up to eight cores and 16 threads, businesses can enable high productivity and collaboration — and with the pandemic, we’ve seen a lot more collaboration across multiple applications that requires this kind of performance.
DISCOVER: Dive deeper into how Ryzen processors can boost performance.
BIZTECH: How do Ryzen 5000 Pro Series processors improve portability?
Portability also gets a boost. On a premium platform, we offer up to 20 hours of battery life. If you look at the past three generations, we more than doubled battery life — from up to seven hours with the Ryzen 3000 Series to up to 16 hours with the Ryzen 4000 Pro Series processors, and we’ve now taken that to up to 20 hours.
The way I think of it is that when you’re able to divvy up different processes by threads or cores, you allow your system not to redline. Instead, you spread it out and can get more efficiency. These low-wattage processors are the holy grail of mobile systems because they make everybody happy: businesses get both performance and portability.
Historically, mobile platforms have been bigger and heavier. What everyone was looking for was getting that performance into something thin and light. We can accomplish this with a relatively low thermal envelope. This means you don’t need huge fans, and the surface heat of the platform is not an issue.
BIZTECH: What does this mean for productivity and security?
On productivity, businesses want responsive computing. How long does it take for applications to come up and start working? If you’ve ever had an issue where your mouse was delayed or keyboard was delayed, you know the frustration of sluggish applications and services. In an internal AMD comprehensive test of common commercial applications such as file compression, anti-virus scanning and Excel workloads, the Ryzen 5000 Pro Series processors offer up to 9 percent faster performance, and up to 10 percent faster performance using Microsoft Office apps while running Zoom conferences, compared to the competition.
As for security technology, our big message is multilayered security features, and there are three major factors that come into play. First is helping to decrease risks to your data. This occurs at the silicon level with shadow stack hardware-enabled protection. A shadow stack stores a copy of return addresses, which is checked against the normal program stack on return operations. If the content differs, an exception is generated, which can help prevent malicious code from gaining control of the system.
Next is the secure processor layer, and AMD Memory Guard can help protect data against standby-state threats by encrypting data within system memory to help guard against physical attacks. Finally, there’s a pending FIPS 140-3 certification that’s supported by the Ryzen 5000 Pro Series processors. This is a government encryption standard that has been adopted by the private sector as a best practice for the validation of secure cryptographic modules.
BIZTECH: What else should businesses know about the Ryzen 5000 Pro Series processors?
The Ryzen 5000 Pro Series processors have a lot of enterprise-class features, from performance and battery life to security features and manageability. The Pro technology benefits are available across the Ryzen stack. Even the Ryzen 3 has a Pro version, which allows customers to get into enterprise-class products at particular price points.
With the Ryzen 4000 Pro and the newer 5000 Pro Series processors, we are faster than the competition, and we’re extending that lead with even more powerful processors, like the Ryzen Threadripper Pro processor, which at 64 cores is the highest-performing processor on a workstation.
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