Computex Two weeks after Microsoft made the AI PC all about Arm-powered processors from Qualcomm, AMD has announced a pair of PC CPU ranges it boasts will handle AI as well or better than any rival - plus silicon that it claimed is the fastest consumer-grade processor ever built.

The CPUs for AI PCs were announced at the Computex exhibition in Taiwan today by CEO Lisa Su, who rated the Ryzen AI 300 Series - aka "Strix" - the planet's pre-eminent NPU as it delivers 50 TOPS

Su compared that figure to the 45 TOPS delivered by the Qualcomm CPUs that Microsoft made the centerpiece of the Copilot+ PCs announcement a couple of weeks back.

But the CEO wasn't content just to talk TOPS. She emphasized that AMD's NPU is the first such chip to handle block FP16. She claimed will mean developers don't have to choose between quality or speed when building generative AI apps - the 300 series will deliver both.

"It will run models at full speed without quantization steps," she explained. "NPUs with the right data types matter."

The two models in the Ryzen AI 300 Series are the twelve-core model 9 HX 370 that operates at between 2.0GHz and 5.1GHz, and the ten-core 9 365 that tops out at 5.0GHz and has the same base frequency. Radeon 800M graphics ride along with both chips.

Both employ a new architecture AMD calls XDMA2 and a new core type, the Xen 5. Su glossed over the latter but told the conference it boasts a new parallel dual pipe front end, plus wider pipelines and vectors.

The 300-series is aimed at thin and light laptops - the accepted definition of an "AI PC" is now a laptop packing an NPU - for those using their PCs for "immersive gaming, and serious content creation."

Would-be buyers were promised excellent battery life, without any claims regarding how long a PC packing a 300-series will operate without being plugged in.

Remember the desktop PC? AMD does

With all this talk of AI PCs, the dear old desktop PC is currently far from the spotlight - seeing as chipmakers are yet to grace them with NPU-packing chips that let them copilot your life. And fair enough, as desktops now account for just 20 percent or so of PC shipments

But that's still over 50 million machines each year, and AMD thinks that's a market worthy of new consumer-grade silicon - namely the Ryzen 9000 Series processors.

Four new models range from six to 16 cores, with base frequencies from 3.9 to 4.4GHz and peak speeds topping out at 5.7GHz.

Su said the 9950X - which tops the core count and clock speed metrics - is the fastest consumer grade CPU sold today.

Workstations are an even smaller market than desktops, but AMD has something new for those machines too: the Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot Workstation Graphics Card.

On sale for $2,999 from June 19, it offers 96 compute units, the same number of ray accelerators, and 192 AI accelerators. AMD believes it bests rivals on performance-per-dollar metrics when running Llama 3 70B Q4.

The announcements above were followed by major PC-makers HP, Lenovo, and ASUS enthusing about models that will put the 300-series to work. Su also talked up over 30 partners who have signed for AMD's forthcoming Versal 2 SoC for edge AI - which will also adopt the XDMA2 architecture. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/06/03/amd_ryzen_300_ai/