AMD today launched its most recent generation of business processors for business PCs, the Ryzen Pro 8000 series, for both desktop and laptops. For now, AMD will be the only CPU vendor offering AI-powered NPUs in business desktop PCs. AMD's launch arrives on the heels of Intel's 14th-gen vPro platform, which also offers desktop and mobile parts. The difference is that Intel launched its vPro refresh based upon the "Raptor Lake Refresh" architecture, which lacks AI; AMD's Ryzen Pro 8000 series is relatively consistent across both its mobile and desktop offerings. However, not every new Ryzen Pro 8000 mobile or desktop chip includes AI support.

AMD is stepping on the gas with its new Ryzen Pro 7040 processors for both business laptops and desktops, injecting Zen 4 CPU technology and RDNA 3 graphics architecture for increased performance. AI, too, will play a role, with some improvements for video calls to clients and partners. The fine print, though, reveals a small penalty: While last year's Ryzen Pro 6000 models were designed for both 35W to 45W laptops as well as thinner 15W to 30W and 10W to 25W thin-and-light laptops, AMD's latest chips require more power. The high-end 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 9 Pro 7940HS consumes 35W to 54W of power, and there's only a single second tier of chips for laptops that consume between 15W and 28W. Still, AMD claims that its new Ryzen Pro 7040 processors can actually outperform an Apple Mac not on performance, but on battery life.

"Last year we were kind of at the cusp," said Roger Chandler, vice president of Intel Architecture, graphics and software, and general manager of client XPU products and solutions. "This year we're really seeing the breakthroughs for the developers, so AI can take the edge of the technology, and the user can focus on what they want to do." Intel used Topaz Labs and its Gigapixel Upscaler app to produce the results below. The app uses AI to add detail to photos, upscaling them to higher resolutions. The next three slides focus more heavily on what you might call "pure" AI, which is much more academic.

AMD just did Intel one better at Computex. Intel wowed the Taipei crowds on Tuesday with a 28-core Core chip, which the company promised by the end of the year. One day later, on Wednesday, AMD announced Threadripper 2--and at 32 cores and 64 threads, it will easily top what Intel promised. AMD's Threadripper 2 announcement was the highlight of the company's press conference, which didn't have much to offer in the way of new announcements in graphics. AMD did say that its Vega 56 Nano for mini-ITX systems is now shipping.

While we don't know much about the Radeon Vega Mobile GPU yet, it's not exactly a surprising announcement. Gamers have been waiting eagerly to see when AMD's new graphics hardware would make it into high-powered laptops. In October, the company revealed that Vega was coming to its new Ryzen mobile processors. It was only a matter of time until it had a more powerful dedicated offering. AMD is also positioning it as something you'd find in ultrathin notebooks, and not just chunky gaming machines.

From self-driving cars to memory products and server chips, Intel themselves have admitted their renewed focus will be on growing markets where they see a ton of untapped potential. However in a PC market where AMD is once again challenging Intel after many years, the company won't be letting go that easily. We know for a fact Intel's eighth-generation Core CPUs will remain on the 14nm manufacturing node, and with Ryzen selling like hotcakes, we then heard the rumor that Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X products along with their accompanying X299 chipset were expected to arrive ahead of schedule sometime around early June. A new leak via Anandtech forums brings more goodies. Code-named Basin Falls, the new quad-core Kaby Lake-X CPUs would get the Core i7 branding, while hexa, octa, 10, and 12-core Skylake-X CPUs would receive the Core i9 moniker.

If you're skeptical whether "optimizations" can truly improve gaming performance on the disruptive new Ryzen CPU, AMD has a message for you: They really can. On Thursday the company released benchmark results from a beta version of Ashes of the Singularity that showed a sizable increase in performance from just a few weeks of tuning for the company's new CPU. Why this matters: When AMD's Ryzen launched with bat-out-of-hell application performance but somewhat slower gaming performance than Intel's rival CPUs, it spawned an Unsolved Mysteries-like search for the cause of such a puzzling disparity. Many theories later (including one that has absolved Microsoft), the only one that seems to be standing are the games themselves. AMD's numbers show that patching Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation with Ryzen optimization could increase performance 26 to 34 percent, a significant boost for Ryzen.

It is that special time of year: Cold and crisp outside, leaves rustling, the perfect setting to announce - this is the end of AMD (NYSE:AMD) (again). Same tired voices hark the end of AMD -- and we would agree, it is over for AMD (AMD) but not in the way the doom and gloom crowd would think. We agree it is the end of the - old - AMD, the one that stood on the brink. A new AMD is being born. Some are mystified how such a company could make a comeback and are equally blind as to see the future of the company and the long-term game plan.

The hotly anticipated Ryzen processors are expected to start rolling out in early March, but AMD's still pushing its older FX-series chips folks looking to build a budget gaming PC. Newegg and AMD just revealed a FX processor promotion that bundles a 6- or 8-core chip with the real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, the poster child for cutting-edge DirectX 12 technology. The Newegg deal includes six popular FX processors ranging in price from $110 to $185, including the FX-6300, FX-6350, FX-8300, FX-8320, FX-8350, and FX-8370. The FX-8350 comes in the standard model for $140, or there's a $160 version that comes with AMD's swanky Wraith cooler. The FX-6350 and FX-8370 are also available with Wraith.