Most powerful AI chip to date: AMD presents mobile Ryzen AI 300 processors

The fact that an AI is in the name of AMD's latest mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC) is no coincidence with the Ryzen AI 300 series. The company wants to emphasise that the CPU is supported by a powerful Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of AI performance. It is said to be the most powerful NPU of all manufacturers to date and of course it also fulfils the requirements that Microsoft places on AI PCs (40 TOPS). These chips are also likely to be in direct competition with the new Snapdragon X Plus and Elite, whose NPU is expected to deliver 45 TOPS.

Like the Snapdragon Elite chips from Qualcomm, the new AMD SoCs come without a big-little concept and therefore do not have special efficiency cores. They are designed to be efficient and powerful at the same time. The chips consist of up to twelve Zen 5 cores, an RDNA 3.5 GPU with up to 16 compute units (1024 shader units) and an XDNA 2 NPU (third generation). Their 50 TOPS correspond to a five-fold increase compared to the previous generation. Performance and power consumption are said to have been improved for the graphics - but AMD does not provide any more precise details. The CPU is said to have a per-clock performance increase (IPC) of 16 per cent on average. The chips are manufactured in a 4-nanometre process at TSMC.

A special feature of the design of the new SoCs is that only four Zen 5 cores are located separately from the NPU and GPU. The remaining cores, referred to by AMD as Zen 5C cores, are mounted on the same monolithic chip surface as the GPU and NPU. The 5Cs differ from the normal Zen 5 cores in their smaller size, which enables increased computing power and greater efficiency per square millimetre. The two models presented so far, Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365, have a total of 12 and 10 cores (24 and 20 threads), of which 8 and 6 are Zen 5C cores respectively.

In terms of power consumption, the new processors are not divided into different TDP versions (U-, HS-, H-series) as before. The notebook manufacturer can now choose from a range of 15 to 54 watts and set a so-called cTDP value. The TDP specification in the table above is therefore actually obsolete.

The first notebooks with the latest AMD Ryzen AI chip are scheduled for release in July 2024.