AMD's new Ryzen PRO, Athlon PRO mobile processors offer 12 hrs of battery life

AMD today has announced a new range of CPUs for mobile computers like laptops and Chromebooks. The lineup includes three Ryzen Pro chips and one Athlon Pro APU. The “pro” in the nomenclature apparently comes from the fact that these chips include a slew of security features and tweaks designed to benefit enterprise consumers the most. These chips are the 2nd generation of Zen based mobile chips from AMD, Zen being the new CPU architecture that completely turned things around for the Intel rival. The new Pro mobility line consists of the following chips:

All chips have a TDP of 15W, which is the average TDP that most Ultrabooks and laptops are designed to handle. According to AMD, these 2nd gen mobile processors feature CPUs that are 16 percent faster and GPUs that are 14 percent faster than before. They’re also claiming a battery life of 12+ hrs in general use and 10 hrs in video. When it comes to real-world performance, AMD’s strength has always lain in its integrated graphics, which are more capable and flexible than Intel’s offerings. Battery life has, of course, been AMD’s biggest weakness. Hopefully, this is adequately addressed in this iteration of processor. [caption id=“attachment_6409361” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] AMD is certainly leveraging its lead over Intel in onboard graphics performance. Image: AMD[/caption] As AMD notes in its presentation, this strength comes into its own when faced with graphics intensive tasks like photo editing, 3D modelling and data visualisation. AMD claims that their processors are over 200 percent faster in some of these tasks, and we’re inclined to believe them. Intel’s integrated graphics have, after all, remained essentially unchanged for about 4-5 generations of CPU. In terms of security, AMD’s new processors feature the expected assortment of secure boot and OS security features, but as a bonus, also include protection against attacks that target RAM. AMD does this by encrypting the memory by default.