AMD unwrapped its new Ryzen AI 300 series, codenamed Strix Point, today at Computex 2024 here in Taipei, Taiwan, with the new chips featuring the new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture with two types of cores, an upgraded RDNA 3.5 graphics engine, and of course, AMD’s new XDNA 2 engine that enables running AI workloads locally. AMD’s new branding scheme now brings ‘AI’ right into the name of the chip, reflecting the company’s strong focus on its new AI-focused XDNA 2 neural processing unit (NPU) that now offers 50 TOPS of performance, a 5X gain for the third generation of AMD’s AI processors. This level of performance beats all other chips for Windows PCs, including Qualcomm’s promising Snapdragon X Elite. It easily exceeds Microsoft’s 40 TOPS requirement for next-gen AI PCs, allowing Copilot elements to run locally.
AMD has plenty of other advances under the hood, too, with a move to 12-core Zen 5 processors for thin-and-light and ultralight notebooks that used to be limited to eight CPU cores and up to 16 compute units for the new RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics engine, an increase over the previous-gen’s maximum of 12 CUs.
