AMD Launches Broad Portfolio of Ryzen Pro Hardware

Last year, AMD launched a new line of enterprise systems built around Ryzen, dubbed Ryzen Pro. AMD has had a business-centric division for several years, and while Ryzen Pro’s overall sales aren’t known, these products are typically guaranteed to receive updates for several years and are built around systems with business-specific features or, in some cases, longer service contracts. Today, AMD announced that Dell, HP, and Lenovo would all offer Ryzen Pro systems for business and enterprise deployments.

It’s a significant win for AMD, even if it isn’t quite as sexy as gaming SKUs or major boutique wins. Volume-wise, companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo collectively ship hundreds of millions of PCs per year. And AMD is launching a range of products with all three companies, including the Dell Latitude 5495, Dell OptiPlex 5055, HP EliteBook 700 G5 series, HP ProBook 645 G4, HP EliteDesk 700 series, Lenovo ThinkPad A series, and Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q and M725s desktop systems. These sorts of systems are often purchased on-contract over several years, which means they represent a revenue stream that keeps ticking even if the economy turns downward or consumer preferences change.

AMD has announced a full suite of CPUs, both with Vega and as standalone cores, shown below:

The new chips cover both laptops and desktops, from 12W-65W, and offer the same brands, core counts, and GPU cores as their desktop counterparts. There don’t appear to be any changes at the silicon level between the consumer and corporate versions of the product.

The big win for AMD, at the macro level, is being included as part of these brands. Latitude, Optiplex, Elitebook, ThinkPad — these are brands with significant levels of customer awareness. While we like to think that buying decisions get made by people who optimize the systems to the task at hand, it’s more likely that customers make big-picture determinations based on a few metrics, like additional RAM. This kind of mismatch between expertise and product is also likely responsible for some of the subpar AMD notebooks we saw Dell launch earlier this year, as opposed to any kind of scheme to preferentially push people towards Intel. AMD wants to take market space away from Intel across the enterprise, and winning more support for its products in business and corporate deployments will help make that happen.

AMD’s overall recovery has continued over the past few months. The company’s last quarter bucked seasonal trends and saw sharply spiking revenue, thanks to ongoing Ryzen sales, Vega and Polaris GPUs, and the overall impact of cryptocurrency sales.

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