AMD Takes On Intel With 2nd-Gen Ryzen Pro For Business Laptop Refresh

AMD is taking on Intel with its new, second-generation Ryzen Pro processors, which target businesses that plan to update their fleets of laptops this year.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced the second-generation AMD Ryzen Pro lineup along with the new AMD Athlon Pro processors on Monday, saying that the 12-nanometer CPUs provide laptop users with "power-efficient performance, state-of-the-art security features, and commercial-grade reliability and manageability."

[Related: AMD Claims Businesses Pay 'Intel Tax' With Xeon Server CPUs]

HP Inc. and Lenovo plan to launch the first laptops using AMD's new processors this quarter, AMD said, with more OEMs expected to launch new Ryzen Pro and Athlon Pro systems later this year.

“As work-life integration goes mainstream and people seek increasing flexibility in their lifestyles, they need accessible tools to stay productive and entertained anytime, anywhere,” Jerry Paradise, vice president of Lenovo’s commercial product portfolio, said in a statement. “Lenovo is pleased to partner with AMD to offer commercial users mobile experiences that balance performance and portability to power the modern workforce, and excited to extend the partnership to our latest premium ThinkPad series notebooks coming soon.”

The second-generation Ryzen Pro lineup consists of three processors, starting with the Ryzen 7 Pro 3700U at the high-end, packing four cores, 10 GPU cores, a base clock frequency of 2.3 GHz and a boost frequency of 4.0 GHz.

The two other Ryzen Pro processors also come with four cores each while featuring lower clock speeds and fewer CPU cores. The AMD Athlon Pro 300U, which targets budget laptops, comes with two cores, three GPU cores, a base clock frequency of 2.4 GHz and a boost frequency of 3.3 GHz. All of the processors use AMD's Radeon Vega integrated graphics and run on 15 watts of power.

With second-generation Ryzen Pro, AMD promises up to 12 hours of battery life for general office productivity applications and up to 10 hours for video playback. Comparing the top-end Ryzen 7 Pro 3700U with Intel's eighth-generation Core i7-8650U, the former is 36 percent faster for photo editing, 64 percent faster for 3D modeling and 258 percent faster for visualization, according to benchmark tests performed by AMD.

While Intel continues to grapple with a CPU shortage that is primarily impacting client computers, AMD promised in a presentation that the new Ryzen Pro and Athlon Pro processors will have "24 months of planned availability for a stable enterprise." The company said the processors will also receive "18 months of "planned software stability."

AMD said the new Ryzen Pro processors will also come with security features, such as a hardware security co-processor, secure boot and memory encryption. In addition, the processors will come with "enterprise-class manageability" that is CPU-agnostic.

The second-generation Ryzen Pro announcement comes after AMD revealed its new line of Ryzen 3000 Series mobile processors for consumer laptops at CES in January. Intel is expected to launch a line of ninth-generation Core processors for laptops sometime this quarter.