AMD put on its corporate attire on Thursday to announce its Ryzen Pro line of processors for enterprise users. The chips, designed to compete with Intel's vPro-compatible processors, offer a number of administrative, management and security capabilities versus mainstream Ryzen parts.
The Ryzen Pro family will initially consist of six configurations. As highlighted in the chart above, the Pro lineup more or less mirrors the mainstream Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 chips already on the market. The exception, of course, is the inclusion of the Ryzen 3 Pro 1200 and Ryzen 3 Pro 1300 chips as AMD hasn't yet announced Core i3-competing Ryzen 3 mainstream parts.
It's worth noting that Intel's enterprise features don't extend to its Core i3 series and are instead only offered on more powerful (and expensive) Core i5 and i7 parts. If a Core i3-class processor is all you need in terms of power but you still want enterprise features, AMD's Ryzen 3 Pro may certainly be worth a look.
AMD says Ryzen Pro chips will feature 18 months of image stability and 24 months of processor availability along with longer 36-month warranties, giving businesses a bit of reassurance with their purchase and upgrade paths.
One key differentiator between AMD and Intel's enterprise offerings is the fact that Ryzen Pro chips will need to be mated to discrete graphics cards. This isn't a concern if they're going into a workstation that'll be tackling graphics-intensive tasks but for entry-level machines, it'll be an added expense for sure.
AMD says we can expect to see Ryzen Pro-based PCs ship in the second half of 2017 (which technically begins in just a few days). Ryzen Pro mobile solutions, on the other hand, won't arrive until the first half of 2018, we're told.