AMD has a broad portfolio of GPUs, CPUs, architectures and networking products and recently joined a standard-building group intended to create standards for AI chip technology in opposition to rival NVIDIA. Its latest hardware, announced at Computex in Taipei on June 2, brings improved AI performance with products including the Ryzen 9000 series and the Ryzen AI 300 chip, which is a repackaging of the Ryzen 9 chips.
The Zen 5 architecture and XDNA 2 NPU power the Ryzen 9000 series, which can be leveraged in desktops for productivity, content creation or gaming. The Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors will be available in July 2024.
The series consists of Ryzen 9 9950X, 9900X, 9700X and 9600X processors.
The Ryzen 9 9950X enhances performance on heavy-duty programs like Blender or Adobe tools with AI features and decreases latency in gaming; AMD claims it outperforms the Intel Core i9. Decreased latency comes in handy for AI in particular. Some models in this series show a marked decrease in heat output, with just 65W thermal design power in the Ryzen 7 9700 X and Ryzen 5 9600 X.
AMD hardware will appear in a wide variety of upcoming laptops from partners including Microsoft, HP, Lenovo and Asus.
“They’re going to get to know you,” said AMD’s Donny Woligroski, senior technical marketing manager of consumer processors, in a press briefing, referring to AI PCs. “They’re going to deliver new levels of intelligent, really personalized PC experiences. And we think it’s (AI PCs are) an inflection point that is really going to drive demand and PC consumption in the coming years.”
AI will enable real-time audio translation, transcription and generation on-device, providing centralized, personalized capabilities. New in this space is the AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series, built on AMD XDNA 2 and Zen 5 CPU cores, with AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics, for AI PCs.
AMD’s XDNA 2 provides an impressive 50 TOPS of compute power, which is basically a measurement of how fast AI inference can be performed in trillions of operations. Zen 5 brings up to 12 cores, which is a lot for a slim laptop. Compare these to Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite at 45 TOPS and Apple M4 at 38 TOPS.
Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake could prove to be another competitor to the XDNA 2 architecture, but it has not yet been revealed in detail.
SEE: Gartner predicts AI chip revenue will continue to rise in 2024.
“This is an incredibly exciting time for AMD as the rapid and accelerating adoption of AI is driving increased demand for our high-performance computing platforms,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO, in a press release.
At Computex, AMD also announced a new roadmap for the release of AMD Instinct MI325X accelerators, which are now expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2024.
Secondly, the 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors for telecommunications and networking, expected to ship in the second half of 2024, will use the next-generation Zen 5 CPU core.
The XDNA 2 NPU architecture provides five times the performance capability of AMD’s first NPU and two times the power efficiency when running generative AI workloads. Since generative AI workloads may be running continuously behind the scenes, that power efficiency may be key to consistent performance.
AMD said the Zen 5 architecture provides:
Zen 5’s instruction bandwidth, data bandwidth and AI performance are double that of the previous generation, AMD said.
The Zen 5 is not an incremental generational jump, said Woligroski. “Zen 5 is a sweeping update,” Woligroski said during a prebriefing for the press.
AMD revealed two new chipsets at Computex: the AMD Socket AM5 X870 and Socket AM5 X870E. These chipsets work with Ryzen processors from 7000 to 9000. These new motherboards come standard with USB 4.0, a significant upgrade, and with PCIe Gen 5.
These chipsets offer higher EXPO overclock support for performance tuning and could provide a new option for upgrading for people who don’t want to jump to AMD’s long-standing AM5 socket.
