At Los Angeles event, chip maker AMD lays out its vision for AI PCs

During the event, Advanced Micro Devices Inc shared technical details of the new Ryzen AI 300 Series chips and the Ryzen 9000 Series processors that will power the next generation of laptops and desktops.

AMD announced two Ryzen AI 300 mobile APUs, each with the same NPU with 50 TOPS but otherwise different specs. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is the flagship chip with 12 cores and 24 threads. AMD also shared more details on the Ryzen 9000 desktop CPU, claiming its Ryzen 9 9950X is the “fastest consumer desktop processor.”

‘Create new experiences’

A gaming desktop powered by an AMD CPU and GPU. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

This marks the chip designer’s biggest move in the space to date, creating a new wave of competition not only for Intel and Qualcomm but also for Apple. AMD’s new processors are set to go into PCs from Asus, MSI, HP, and others that will become available starting later this month.

“As we think about building the next AI PC, we did not want to build yet another PC,” said Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and General Manager (Computing and Graphics), AMD, while addressing the audience in a packed hall. “Of course, AI can make things faster, but that’s not what we’re here to do. We are here to create new experiences; we want to build disruptive form factors,” added Huynh.

First teased at the Computex trade show in Taiwan last month, the new processors, which will be fabbed on a mix of 4 nm and 3 nm processes, claim to be the “world’s most powerful NPU” with 50 TOPS of power for local AI acceleration. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus chips hit 45 TOPS, while even Intel’s next-gen “Lunar Lake” chips are expected to have a 45 TOPS ceiling. This is an important factor for Copilot Plus features in Windows 11, which require an NPU with at least 40 TOPS.

“The XDNA 2 architecture, unlike other NPUs on the market, is built on a spatial data flow architecture. It is a two-dimensional array of AI compute with a smart interconnect, and that interconnect can be programmed dynamically at runtime and reconfigured to create custom compute hierarchies. This is unlike any other NPU out there,” said Vamsi Boppana, Senior Vice President (Artificial Intelligence Group), AMD.

Selling AI devices

AMD laptops with Ryzen AI 300 processors. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

With AI PCs, the industry hopes the new buzzy Artificial Intelligence technology will help revive the market that has seen a steep decline over the past few years. AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm all want to make AI chips. Even original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including Dell, HP, Asus, and Lenovo, are leaning heavily on those AI processors to sell devices to consumers. Even Apple plans to integrate AI into its consumer products like the Mac later this year, hoping to normalise AI with features and new experiences that may help users improve their interaction with these AI devices.

AMD’s slow and steady gains over its bigger rival Intel can’t be ignored, and the company says its next-generation AI processors may help it gain a lead over the competition. AMD continues to focus on performance gains while providing much better battery life in thinner and lighter machines such as laptops. However, it’s not easy to take on Intel, given the chip maker’s dominance of the ecosystem. At the event, AMD tried to make a big pitch around openness and, perhaps more importantly, provided users with good reasons to consider computers powered by its AMD chips.

The writer was in Los Angeles to attend AMD Tech Day at the company’s invitation.