The battle for AI PC chip supremacy is heating up, but AMD is still firmly in the lead.
On Thursday AMD announced the launch of three new processors in the Ryzen AI 300 line, bringing that same best-in-class NPU performance to the PRO enterprise line of processors.
The AMD Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360, Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, and Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375 processors will flesh out AMD's current slate of Laptop processors with three additional SKUs, making for a total of six AMD Ryzen AI 300 chips. This is also the first Ryzen 7 processor in the new lineup.
One of the most talked about metrics is NPU TOPS (trillions of operations per second), and AMD is now leading the race with 50 TOPS of performance on the Ryzen AI 300 series of laptop chipsets.
Here's everything we know so far about AMD's new chips:
Ryzen AI PRO features
All three new AMD chips belong to the PRO lineup, who is designed for enterprise customers. That means we'll see these new chips primarily in business laptops.
The PRO line comes with increased security for commercial use, so these powerful AI chips are built from the silicon up for business users. The chips use AMD PRO technologies for better manageability, allowing for easier IT streamlining.
When it comes to performance, the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360, Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, and Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375 have three times the AI performance of the previous Ryzen 8040 series as the Ryzen AI 300 series makes the jump from 16 TOPS of NPU performance to 50 TOPS of performance.
All three processors use AMD's new Zen 5 architecture which comes with plenty of benefits to computing performance and speed. Zen 5 chips are significantly more powerful than their Zen 4 counterparts. Combined with the Ryzen XDNA 2 NPU, these are some pretty powerful business laptops with strong generative AI capabilities for text and image generation to spruce up your next presentation.
Will Ryzen AI take over the business laptop space?
We've been incredibly impressed by the performance of the Ryzen AI 300 chips in laptops like the Asus Zenbook S 16, but it was the gaming performance of the new RDNA 3.5 integrated GPU that blew us away on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
While business customers generally don't need great graphics rendering, the CPU and NPU performance on the Ryzen AI 300 series have been fantastic. Unfortunately, the one flaw in the Ryzen AI 300 series is its battery life. The Zenbook S 16 lasted a solid 11 hours and 35 minutes on the Laptop Mag battery test, but, that battery life is easily eclipsed by most of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops and all of the Intel Lunar Lake laptops we've seen so far.
Business laptops could be the arena where a lower battery life matters less, as business users will often connect laptops to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor workstation setup. This gives AMD an edge over Intel, as the Intel Core 200V Lunar Lake series prioritizes power efficiency over performance while AMD chose to prioritize performance over efficiency.
We know that major enterprise laptop makers like Lenovo have already announced a few enterprise laptops powered by AMD's Ryzen AI PRO lineup, so we will definitely be seeing some AMD business laptops this generation. And with all of the benefits of Ryzen AI 300, this could be AMD's time to shine.
