‘Trying to enable a whole range of interactions; NPU is a part of the equation’: AMD director on AI PCs

“We don’t get up in the morning thinking we’re just trying to make the price advantage systems. We want to have platforms in each of those lanes, so that customers at all levels can take advantage of the technology that’s out there,” added Anguiano.

Companies like AMD are betting on new Copilot Plus PCs, powered by the Ryzen AI 300 Series, which features its next-gen NPU (XDNA 2, with up to 50 TOPS), an updated CPU using the new generation Zen 5 process, and an upgraded integrated GPU (RDNA 3.5). They want to fire up enthusiasm in the PC market as the demand for Artificial Intelligence tools grows and the competition intensifies among chip companies to demonstrate supremacy in providing the brains for cutting-edge devices.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop processor. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

“We know that you don’t actually need an NPU to run AI workloads. There are other ways to accomplish this, but there’s a purpose in having the NPU and the AI PC, and that’s really to establish that there are good, better, best methods in how you are going to prepare applications and how you’re going to process them,” said Anguiano.

New AMD chips, based on AMD’s new architecture, help the company better compete against Intel on performance and power consumption, while the long battery life brings AMD-based PCs closer to Apple’s Macs than they have been in years.

“I think everybody’s kind of positioning different opportunities, but at the same time, they understand there are aspects of this that need to evolve,” Anguiano said citing the example of the superior battery life on AI PCs — a universal experience everyone is seeking.

AMD-powered Copilot+ PC. (Image credit: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

“The NPU is a part of that equation, but from AMD’s standpoint, what we’re trying to do is enable a whole range of interactions. So whether it’s a physical interaction because now you have a thin, light system, or whether it’s an interaction that comes from enterprise back to your home, or whether it’s just what you always thought you could do and you can do more of it, we’re trying to bring all of those options. As we move into an AI world where we know that processing, if done in old ways—straight GPU, brute force, whatever you want to call it—takes a ton of power, you’re not going to achieve that,” he said.

With the first set of AI PCs arriving in July from Asus and other companies, the Ryzen AI chips are set to take on Intel, Qualcomm, and Apple, as AMD plans to catch up and gain an upper hand by providing performance and efficiency as well as battery life in thinner and lighter machines such as laptops.

“It’s not just an AI PC. This is the way forward for PCs. This changes the industry because now we’re thinking about things that we just wouldn’t have thought about before, and not just AMD, but all of us together,” said Anguiano.

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