AMD announced the Ryzen AI 300 series mobile processors today at Computex 2024, and it will be here much sooner than many had expected.
The new SoCs will feature the most powerful NPU yet released on a mobile platform, far outstripping the one in the AMD Ryzen 8000-series chips announced at CES, and both chips are well north of where they need to be for Microsoft Copilot+.
There are two chips at launch, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365. The former is a 12-core/24-thread processor with Radeon 890M graphics, a max boost clock of 5.1GHz, and 36MB cache. The Ryzen AI 9 365, meanwhile, features 10 cores, 20 threads, a max boost clock of 5.0GHz, and 34MB cache. Both chips feature a 50 TOPS NPU.
The new chips will be available in laptops starting in July 2024.
The new mobile SoCs comes on the heels of Microsoft's Copilot+ PC showcase event on May 20, where major OEMs and Microsoft itself showed off a large portfolio of laptops featuring the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X SoCs, and AMD confirmed during that event that they would be fully partnering with Microsoft to meet the new Copilot+ standard.
While it's not surprising that AMD announced its new chips, it does confirm that AMD will almost certainly bring its AI laptops to market before Intel's, as we're still waiting to hear an update from Intel about its AI PC plans as we head into the second half of the year.
AMD will have the x86 AI PC market to itself for a while, but for long long?
Now that AMD has announced its latest SoC, with an expected ship date of July 2024, we're only about six weeks away from getting out hands on a Copilot+-capable x86 chip. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X is based on Arm, which is a different microarchitecture than the x86 architecture used by AMD and Intel.
Fortunately for AMD and Intel, Windows has been built from the ground up with x86 in mind, so all its apps and functionality run natively on x86 chips. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X, meanwhile, will have to have native Arm apps developed for it or else use emulation similar to how Apple M-series chips can use Rosetta to get older Mac apps built for x86 chips to run on the new Apple silicon.
Nothing beats a native experience though, and with these new AMD chips hitting the scene soon, we'll be able to more fully dive into the Windows Copilot+ features that will be better optimized for Windows out of the box than Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips.
For the time being at least, AMD will have this space to itself, at least until Intel announces Lunar Lake and ships its next-gen AI chips to manufacturers.
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