Last January, AMD beat Intel by launching its Ryzen 7040 chips, the first x86 processors to integrate a neural processing unit (NPU) for ai workloads. Intel's long-delayed Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" The chips, the first to integrate an NPU, will arrive on December 14. But it seems AMD can't help but remind Intel that it's falling behind: Today, AMD is announcing the Ryzen 8040 series chips, its next batch of ai-equipped laptop hardware, and it's also giving us a glimpse into its future. ai roadmap.
The Ryzen 8040 chips, led by the 8-core Ryzen 9 8945HS, are up to 1.4 times faster than their predecessors when it comes to Llama 2 and ai Vision model performance, according to AMD. They're also up to 1.8 times faster than Intel's top-end 13900H chip when it comes to gaming and 1.4 times faster for content creation. Of course, the real test will be comparing them to Intel's new Core Ultra chips, which were not available for AMD to compare.
AMD's NPU will be available on all Ryzen 8040 chips except the two lower-end models, the six-core Ryzen 5 8540U and the quad-core Ryzen 3 8440U. The company says that the Ryzen 7040's NPU, AMD XDNA, is capable of reaching 10 TOPS (tera operations per second), while the 8040's NPU can reach 16 TOPS. Looking ahead to 2024, AMD also previewed its next NPU architecture, codenamed "strix point," what will offer "More than 3 times the generative performance of ai NPU." Basically, don't expect AMD to slow down its ai ambitions anytime soon.
It's worth remembering that both AMD and Intel are behind Qualcomm when it comes to bringing NPUs to Windows PCs. Its SQ3 powered the ill-fated Surface Pro 9 5G. That was only a small victory for the Snapdragon maker, however: the Windows experience on Arm is still a disaster, especially when it comes to running older apps that require x86 emulation.
The much more compelling competitor to Intel and AMD is Apple, which has been integrating Neural Engines into its hardware since the A11 Bionic debuted in 2017, and has made them a core component of Apple Silicon chips for Macs. Apple's Neural Engine It speeds up ai tasks, just like NPUs from AMD and Intel, and helps address things like Face ID and photo processing. On PCs, NPUs enable features like Windows 11's Studio Effects in video chats, which can blur the background or help maintain eye contact.
Like Intel, AMD is also pushing developers to incorporate NPU features into their applications. Today also presents the ai-software-platform.html”>Ryzen ai Software Platform, which will allow developers to take pre-trained ai models and optimize them to run on Ryzen ai hardware. AMD's platform will also help those models run on Intel NPUs, similar to how Intel's ai development tools will ultimately help Ryzen systems. We're still in the early days to see how developers will take advantage of NPUs, but hopefully AMD and Intel's competitive streak will help deliver truly useful ai-powered applications soon.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amds-ryzen-8040-chips-remind-intel-its-falling-behind-in-ai-pcs-200043544.html?src=rss
