AMD 'Ryzen AI' Laptop CPUs, Ryzen 9000 ‘Zen 5’ Range, AI Plans Announced

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su delivered the first keynote at the Computex 2024 trade show, announcing a whole range of new CPUs and chipsets for desktops and laptops, a professional workstation graphics card, and more. Laying out the company’s strategy for AI going forward, Su called this year’s edition of Computex the most important ever, and affirmed that AI is her number one priority for the company. 

Starting with high-end desktop PCs, Su announced the upcoming Ryzen 9000 CPU series based on the new Zen 5 microarchitecture. AMD claims a 16 percent average gen-on-gen performance increase, and says the new Ryzen 9 9950X will be the world’s fastest consumer desktop processor when it goes on sale in July. This is based on comparisons to the current-gen Intel Core i9-14900K. This generation of CPUs promises double the AI performance of their predecessors, thanks to AVX512 instruction set support.

The Ryzen 9000 series will be targeted at gamers and content creators. The top-end Ryzen 9 9950X has 16 cores and 32 threads, running at up to 5.7GHz. It has a 170W rated TDP. AMD has also launched the Ryzen 9 9900X with 12 cores, the octa-core Ryzen 7 9700X, and the Ryzen 5 9600X with six cores. Pricing has not yet been announced. Additional models are likely to follow. 

AMD Ryzen 9000 series specifications

These CPUs use the AM5 socket, which allows for compatibility with previous-gen motherboards. AMD has also committed to supporting the AM5 socket till at least 2027, giving buyers a relatively easy upgrade path. New X870 and X870E chipsets support PCIe 5.0, USB4, Wi-Fi 7, and faster DDR5 RAM.

Interestingly, AMD is also releasing updated Ryzen 5000 series CPUs to prolong the life of its DDR4-based Socket AM4 platform, first introduced in 2016. This gives users of older PCs another upgrade path, extending the lives of their other components. The new Ryzen 9 5900XT and Ryzen 7 5800XT feature 16 cores and 8 cores respectively. Both have 105W TDPs. 

AMD’s next generation of laptop CPUs introduces a new product naming scheme, aimed at promoting its AI capabilities. The company says the new Ryzen AI 300 series is its third generation of AI-capable processors, following the 7x70 and 8x40 lineups. Not coincidentally, these chips will go up against Intel’s Core Ultra 200-series CPUs when they launch later this year. 

AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptop design wins

The top-end Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has 12 “Zen 5” cores and 24 threads, with a peak speed of 5.1GHz and integrated Radeon 890M graphics. There’s also a Ryzen AI 9 365 with 10 cores and 20 threads running at up to 5GHz, and Radeon 880M graphics. Both have TDP ranges of 15-54W which OEMs can configure, and both also feature second-gen NPUs capable of 50 TOPs of AI processing bandwidth.

AMD claims the top spot as far as NPUs go this generation, with its 50 TOPS claim beating Qualcomm’s recent Snapdragon X Elite launch and Apple’s M4, as well as Intel’s projected “Lunar Lake” Core Ultra CPUs. Ryzen AI 300 processors will power Microsoft CoPilot+ features in Windows 11. Performance in generative AI tasks is said to be improved thanks to support for block floating point operations, combining the speed and quality advantages of traditional integer and floating-point processing. Moreover, more than 150 software developers including Microsoft, Adobe and Zoom are optimising their AI-enabled apps for AMD’s hardware. Running AI tasks locally rather than over the Internet also helps boost privacy.

Battery life is another major point, with Ryzen AI 300 promising double the power efficiency when running AI workloads on its NPU. HP, Lenovo, Asus, and MSI will be among the OEMs offering CoPilot+ certified laptops running on Ryzen AI 300 CPUs later this year.

Su also laid out AMD’s ambitions to dominate AI-centric datacentres, with its next-generation Instinct MI325, MI350 and MI400 accelerators planned on a yearly cadence starting from 2024. She also previewed the company’s 5th Gen AMD Epyc CPUs for servers, scheduled to release in late 2024. For clients who require AI-capable fully programmable FPGA chips, AMD’s 2nd Gen Versal AI Edge processors are already available to partners who are developing their custom solutions, such as Subaru, to enable its “zero fatalities” mission for its EyeSight ADAS Platform, and Illumina, a genome sequencing research firm.