AMD is doing something it’s never done before with Zen 5

The pressure is on at Computex this year. With the May announcement of Copilot+ PCs and Microsoft’s deep partnership with Qualcomm, the stakes were high for AMD coming into the show. But the company certainly didn’t show up empty-handed.

Its announcements have all centered around Zen 5, the company’s latest architecture, both on desktop and mobile. But at the moment, these mobile chips feels especially noteworthy in light of Copilot+. AMD calls it the Ryzen AI 300 series. It’s a complete rebrand for AMD, not unlike Intel’s move to “Core Ultra” in its most recent generation. But this time, it’s all about AI.

The new mobile CPUs promise to deliver huge performance uplifts that will help them compete against Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm. The two chips that fall under the new branding are the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the Ryzen AI 9 365. Both processors appear to be very similar, and they both mark a major upgrade over AMD’s previous ventures into the world of AI.

The XDNA 2 neural processing unit (NPU) performance went up from 16 tera operations per second (TOPS) to 50 TOPS, enabling the chips to perform tasks such as running generative AI models locally. Reaching 50 TOPS on the NPU is a big deal for AMD. It needed a minimum of 40 TOPs to meet the requirements for Copilot+ experiences like Recall, but it went beyond that, beating the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and potentially surpassing Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake.

Aside from the vastly improved NPU, AMD is also serving up more GPU power with up to 16 compute units (CUs), which is comparable to a desktop RX 6500 XT.

What do these improvements mean in terms of performance? AMD promises to deliver a vast improvement in AI responsiveness. When tested on the Llama-2 7(B) large language model, the Ryzen 9 HX 370 proved to be up to five times faster than the Ryzen 9 8940HS. It also did a good job when stacked up against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, winning by an impressive 60% in the 3DMark Night Raid Graphics test, 30% in Cinebench 24 nT, and 10% in Procyon Office. Productivity gets a boost, too, with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 scoring a huge win in Blender, beating the Apple M3 by 98% and the Intel Core Ultra 185H by 73%.

AMD also shared some gaming benchmarks, once again comparing to the Core Ultra 185H, and it’s good news all around for AMD. The lowest lead it scored was 128% in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the biggest was 147% in Cyberpunk 2077.

The new Ryzen AI chips will eventually find homes in over 100 Windows Copilot+ laptops starting in July. Some of AMD’s partners include Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI, and it’s not all just workstations like the Asus Zenbook S or the Asus Vivobook S — although those are coming too. Some of these laptops fill the gap in the lineup of more powerful Copilot+ PCs with discrete GPUs, such as the Asus ProArt P16.

AMD even teased that the upcoming processors will appear in some of the best gaming laptops, such as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 or the MSI Stealth A16 AI+.

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