Today, AMD announced new products that will expand its commercial mobile and desktop AI PC portfolio, delivering exceptional productivity and premium AI and connectivity experiences to business users. The new AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series are the most advanced x86 processors built for business laptops and mobile workstations. In addition, AMD also announced the AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series desktop processor, the first AI enabled desktop processor for business users, engineered to deliver cutting-edge performance with low power consumption.

With AMD Ryzen AI built into select models, AMD is further extending its AI PC leadership. By leveraging the CPU, GPU, and dedicated on-chip neural processing unit (NPU), new Ryzen AI-powered processors provide more dedicated AI processing power than previous generations, with up to 16 dedicated NPU TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) and up to 39 total system TOPS. Commercial PCs equipped with new Ryzen AI-enabled processors will help transform user experience, offering next-gen performance for AI-enabled collaboration, content creation, and data and analytics workloads. With the addition of AMD PRO technologies, IT managers can unlock enterprise-grade manageability features to simplify IT operations and complete PC deployment faster across the organization, built-in security features for chip-to-cloud defense from sophisticated attacks, as well as unprecedented stability, reliability and platform longevity for enterprise software.

At CES, AMD didn't give away too many technical details of its upcoming Ryzen 8000G-series APUs, but details are starting to trickle out and it's not all good news. As has been known for some time, AMD is using two different chips to make the Ryzen 8000G APUs and they're known as the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2, where the Phoenix 2 parts feature Zen 4c cores, which are not present in the Phoenix 1 APUs. This in and of itself shouldn't be a huge issue, although the Zen 4c CPU cores can be slightly slower in some tasks based on testing of AMD's EPYC server parts.

However, PCGamesN noticed that Gigabyte has posted the full specs for the B650E Aorus Elite X AX Ice motherboard and it looks like there's a much bigger difference between the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2 based APUs. Namely, the Phoenix 2 APUs have fewer PCIe lanes and as such are limited to two PCIe 4.0 lanes for the secondary NVMe slot. As if this wasn't bad enough, the Phoenix 2 APUs only have four PCIe 4.0 lanes for add-in GPUs, whereas the Phoenix 1 APUs have eight. This is very likely to lead to reduced performance if a higher-end GPU is used with such an APU. Note that this will vary depending on the motherboard design, but many B650/B650E boards feature a similar design with regards to the PCIe lanes coming from the CPU socket. Luckily, it's easy to avoid this issue, as the Ryzen 5 8600G and the Ryzen 7 8700G are both Phoenix 1 designs, whereas the Ryzen 5 8500G is the only Phoenix 2 design available in retail, as the Ryzen 3 8300G is an OEM only part.

ASUS, via its Republic o Gamers branding, today announced the Strix GL10CS gaming desktop, which fits full-size power into a compact 27-liter case that uses futuristic armor and ROG's obsession with speed as design inspirations.

Customizable Aura Sync RGB lighting can be controlled from Armoury Crate, a single utility that provides all-access configuration and monitoring of the GL10CS. GL10CS is equipped with up to a 6-core 12-thread Intel Core i7-8700 processor, capable of handling multiple concurrent workloads such as gaming, streaming and running voice communication for teammates. With up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, GL10CS effortlessly switches from productivity tasks to more demanding workloads provided by multi-threaded applications used by content creators.

UK system integrator Evesham has announced a new range of Zieo notebooks. Their NX600-HD is powered by the NVIDIA GeForce Go 8700M GT. The card comes with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, but Evesham doesn't mention any clock speeds.

The NX600-HD has a 17in display with a native resolution of 1,920x1,200, a choice of a Core 2 Duo T7500 or T7700 processor, 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory and 100 to 250GB of storage.

Other features include a DVI port, four USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, S/PDIF, TV-out, Gigabit Ethernet, modem, Wi-Fi, a memory card reader and an Express Card slot.

The NX600-HD weighs 3.95kg, so it's not something you'd want to carry around with you. It measures 397x284x44mm (WxDxH) and it has about 2h battery life according to Evesham.