AMD Announces 2nd Gen Ryzen Pro Mobile CPUs & New Budget Athlon Pro

Announced today, AMD released its latest refresh of its Ryzen Pro lineup of low-power mobile CPUs, used in commercial and business sectors. These CPUs are in effect the same 2nd generation Ryzen CPUs we saw launched at CES, but with AMDs Pro security co-processor.

These new Ryzen Pro CPUs are built around the Zen+ architecture (not Zen 2), but come equipped with extra security features such as support for Windows 10 Enterprise and fTPM/TPM2. They also feature full memory encryption with TSME and integrated hardware accelerators for cryptographic hashing, such as AES128.

Since these chips are largely a refresh of the previous 2000-series Ryzen Pro CPUs, there isn’t a huge amount going on with raw performance. While there is a manufacture process shrink from 14nm to 12nm, there is only a small boost to clock speeds, about 100-300MHz base/boost.

What is new, is the introduction of a low-end CPU to the range, the Athlon Pro 300U, a dual-core four-thread CPU that aims to be a fully fledged security-focused professional CPU on a budget. This CPU is special in that Intel offers no real competing product with the same full security suite in this price range. The Athlon chip is also an alternative for the growing crowd of professional Chromebooks that are emerging.

As part of the Pro package, AMD will provide 18 months of image stability (for drivers and the like), and 24 months of processor availability for mid to long-term hardware support. AMD claims to have equal or better performance all around compared to Intel’s 8000 series CPUs in the same TDP range, and fairly decent battery ratings of 12+ hours of productivity, and about 10 hours video playback – basically a full day’s worth of work, or a long flight.

Performance results according to AMD’s internal testing.

Since these chips make use of Vega graphics as well, they should be able to handle some modest 3D work, such as running CAM and CAD software, like Fusion 360, or graphical tasks like Photoshop. Although, the low-end Athlon Pro 300U may struggle a bit as it only has three Vega Compute Units (CU).

These new CPUs will be made available through the usual partners, such as HP and Lenovo. Higher performance parts above 15 Watt TDP were not released at this time, but we may see those released later this year.