Integrated AI Engines like Ryzen AI are the future of PCs, say AMD & ACER executives

Here are some excerpts from the interaction with Vinay Sinha and Harish Kohli:

Vinay Sinha, Managing Director – Sales, AMD India

With Ryzen 7000 series what growth opportunities is AMD looking forward to?

The sudden increase in demand for PCs during the pandemic as companies shifted to remote work fuelled growth. With computers playing a significant role in our lives now, I think we’ll see more consumers focusing on the quality of their computing experiences.

Work-life balance is gaining prominence and consumers look forward to devices with features that can help them strike this balance. These include features such as all-day battery life, high-performance capability to handle workloads – which are more AI-driven today- and all of this at reasonable price points. Thanks to its built-in flexibility and features like the AMD Ryzen AI, the Ryzen 7000 series mobile platform is tailor-made for such scenarios. I see tremendous scope for growth this year.

How can the 7000 series mobile platform benefit consumers?

The key benefits of the AMD Ryzen 7000 series are power and efficiency. For premium devices, we’re able to promise both cutting-edge tech and performance thanks to Zen 4, and enable new experiences with the AMD Ryzen AI. This vastly improves efficiency owing to the new 4 nm and 5 nm manufacturing process.

For mainstream devices, we can skew more towards value by offering Zen 2, Zen 3+, and RDNA2-based designs to OEMs that will still offer class-leading performance and efficiency at very competitive price points. For example, the Ryzen 7020 series, which can be found in more value-offering devices like the Acer Aspire 3, offers nearly 12 hours of battery life. Ultimately, consumers get a lot more freedom of choice with the Ryzen 7000 series mobile platform.

What is the significance of Ryzen AI to gamers and content creators?

One of the biggest benefits of Ryzen AI will be its efficiency. Since AI-based tasks can be off-loaded to a dedicated AI Engine, more computing resources can be freed up for gaming and content creation. Streamers can take advantage of AI-based noise removal tools, editors can more efficiently use features like AI subject detection and tracking. AI models like stable diffusion or Photoshop’s neural filters could be more performant, saving time on rendering. You won’t have to run to a charging station every 30 minutes every time you want to live stream a game or work on a video project.

What is the significance of AMD’s Ryzen AI engine and what does this mean for the PC industry?

Features we take for granted today, like real-time background blur in meetings and noise removal in audio, required powerful, discrete GPUs just a few years ago. By increasing the efficiency of such AI models and taking advantage of the more powerful CPUs and GPUs available on today’s laptops, these experiences can now be had on any laptop.

However, these models still do not run efficiently on x86 CPUs or on GPUs. If we want all-day battery life with today’s increasingly AI-driven workloads, we need powerful, efficient, and integrated AI Engines like our XDNA-based Ryzen AI on the 7040. Right now, there’s nothing else like it, and the efficiencies we’ve unlocked thanks to Ryzen AI cannot be easily replicated on any other x86 platform. AI is the future of computing, and integrated AI Engines like Ryzen AI are the future of PCs.

On AMD’s plans to strengthen its OEM partnerships in the region

We’ve always had close ties with our OEMs and will be engaging with them more closely via joint marketing and promotional activities, just as we did recently with Acer during the launch of the Ryzen 7000-powered Nitro lineup of laptops.

We’re also supporting them with a more flexible mobile platform in Ryzen 7000. Our OEMs can more finely customise their products, and thus more easily meet customer demands at any price point.

How has the reception of the Ryzen 7000 series processors (mobile and desktop) been in India?

Since devices powered by the Ryzen 7000 Series Mobile Platform-based laptops have only just launched, it’s too early to comment on how it’s being received. Initial reviews of launched devices have been very encouraging, however.

How are AMD-powered (Ryzen 7000) laptops different from the competition?

For a start, the Ryzen 7000 is built on smaller — 4, 5, and 6 nm nodes — manufacturing processes. This in itself gives the platform a significant boost both in terms of speed and efficiency. The smaller node is more power efficient, and since it’s less power-hungry, we can push clock speeds higher in the same thermal envelope.

Then we have features like Ryzen AI, the world’s first integrated AI Engine on x86 which unlocks a whole host of new capabilities and efficiencies in the laptop form factor. We’re even offering significantly larger cache sizes — 80 MB in the case of the 7045HX — which further boost performance in gaming and CPU-intensive tasks like compiling code. Lastly, our RDNA3 graphics engine, and even RDNA2 on mainstream SKUs, is significantly faster and more power efficient than competing integrated GPU solutions.

Harish Kohli, President and Managing Director, ACER

What are the key factors driving the demand for Acer laptops in India?

When it comes to Indians, there is a growing desire for laptops that fit their lifestyle and deliver great performance at an affordable price. In the last two years due to the pandemic, it has altered how we live and utilise technology. During this time the PC market grew exponentially because of work-from-home and learn-from-home requirements. We have also seen that in metro households, PCs have become more of a personal device than a shared device which is a positive sign as we see more PCs per household. When it comes to gaming, the last few years have witnessed e-sports transforming into a viable profession.

This has encouraged Acer to invest more in gaming laptops and accessories and launch the latest products around the same time as global launches.

We are excited about 2023 because compared to mobile phones, which have 600 million users, we think PCs are still under-penetrated in India. As a result, these are the primary drivers fueling India’s demand for Acer laptops. We think the PC market still has a lot of room to develop, with important market sectors like gaming, SMB, government, BFSI, first-time purchasers, and upgrade customers driving demand.

How is Acer planning to strengthen its leadership through its partnership with AMD for the Ryzen 7000 series?

Acer has a history of incorporating cutting-edge innovation into our products and offering a considerable advantage in terms of innovation and performance. The Acer laptops with AMD processors will give a powerful performance, make multitasking simpler, gaming more immersive, offer longer battery life, and enable improved productivity.

The latest AMD processors will assist in accomplishing our goal of providing our clients with powerful and technologically sophisticated solutions. With our Aspire laptop line, we have already been the first to market with AMD’s newest Ryzen 7000 series processor. AMD’s advanced CPUs are well-received in the market for performance laptops, which is encouraging for us to introduce new products with them.

In both the consumer and business markets, we are growing our volume share on AMD by a significant margin in 2023 than compared to 2022. With their Ryzen PRO 6000 series, which guarantees improved security, potent performance, a long battery life, and simple manageability, AMD is also taking a bigger position in the enterprise market. We are thrilled about this collaboration and what we can offer clients by fusing our state-of-the-art laptops with cutting-edge AMD processors.

What new AMD-powered models are launching?

In India, we are the first company to launch the Aspire 3 laptop equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7000 series processor. This laptop is specifically made for those who desire high performance in a thin body at an affordable price. The performance and portability of the Aspire 3 on Ryzen 7000 make it ideal for a variety of everyday use cases and productivity requirements.

After receiving extremely positive feedback for our Aspire 3 series, we made the decision to release the Swift Go laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7000 processor as well. Swift Go is a sleek metallic design that matches the lifestyle quotient of our Swift users and delivers excellent performance to simplify multitasking, enhance battery life, and enable better productivity on the go.

We’re expanding our selection of gaming laptops and will shortly introduce the Nitro 5, which will have up to Ryzen 7-7000 series processor ideal for demanding video editing, 4K HDR streaming, and high-performance gaming. The Nitro 5 laptop, powered by a Ryzen 7 7000 series processor, is the ideal option for gamers who want to play AAA games without having to shell out a lot of money. We have other laptops planned for this year that will serve a wide range of consumer segments.

We appreciate the partnership with AMD because it enables us to provide our customers with some of the best-in-class technology enabling a better computing experience. 2022 was a milestone year for Acer as we broke multiple records and we believe 2023 will be more successful for us due to partners like AMD helping us to bring such products to market.