AMD says its top-tier Ryzen AI chip will beat Apple, Intel and Qualcomm

2024 will go down in tech history as the year Microsoft finally turned Windows laptops into serious MacBook competitors. So far, that’s been thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips, which switched to a homogeneous chip architecture, bumped up clock speeds and caught up to Apple’s speedy, power-efficient processors. But now AMD says it has chips that can take on MacBooks, too — and keep the company’s processors in the mix.

AMD held a two-day event in Los Angeles last week to reveal in-depth information about its new Strix Point Ryzen AI chips, built on its brand new Zen 5 architecture. Zen 5 is expected to be a big leap over AMD’s previous-generation chip architecture, delivering more instructions per clock cycle and higher frame rates for gaming at as little as 15W of power.

At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I’ve ever heard a company directly attack a competitor. AMD claimed that its new Ryzen chip “outperforms what the MacBook Air can offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming”; is “15 percent faster than the M3 Pro” in Cinebench; and is able to power up to four displays, “unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to just two displays.”

But AMD didn’t just tell reporters that its upcoming Ryzen AI chips are faster than Apple’s M3 and M3 Pro, it also said its new integrated graphics beat Qualcomm’s current-generation and Intel’s previous generation, while pointedly noting that it can power “triple-A games in full HD,” including titles that simply “don’t run on some of our competitors.” AMD also claimed that its NPU can perform 50 trillion floating point operations per second, more than any of its Microsoft Copilot Plus laptop competitors will offer this year.

But AMD still has to prove whether they are faster.

Games that AMD said ran faster on its new iGPU weren’t available to test at the event. Most of AMD’s AI demos didn’t actually run on AMD’s NPU, and the ones that did weren’t responsive. AMD’s most interesting AI demo — Asus’ automatic file consolidation and organization program — wasn’t available to try at all, and AMD’s most powerful gaming laptop on show ran its games on Nvidia graphics with Nvidia upscaling, not its own integrated graphics.

Multiple AMD representatives gave me varying answers as to why all of this wasn’t available: the demo laptops aren’t representative of the final product; Asus may be working on final BIOS tweaks; the hotel’s Wi-Fi is too slow to install other games; they weren’t sure why some AI apps weren’t running on the NPU.

While I wasn’t able to see the Ryzen AI chips in action, here’s what I discovered at the event.

It sounds like Ryzen AI could be significantly faster than AMD’s previous-generation laptop chips. AMD says the new Zen 5 CPU architecture delivers an average of 16 percent more instructions per clock cycle (IPC), allowing tasks to be performed much faster without needing to increase the chip’s clock speed.

And while the CPU cores in a sample game only provide a 10 percent IPC uplift (Far Cry 6), AMD says its new RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture gives these chips between 19 percent and 32 percent more graphics performance per watt at 15 watts, which is the wattage that the thinnest laptops and handheld gaming systems standardly use. Compared to the previous generation, the integrated graphics should theoretically be able to generate more frames per second, use less power, or some combination of both.

While AMD’s chips are theoretically more efficient than before, it wouldn’t confirm whether these machines will see further improvements in battery life. At the event, AMD would only say that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “eight hours or more.” I was unable to speak with an Asus representative at the event to get an actual number for the laptops it was demonstrating, and AMD seemed reluctant to give me an answer beyond “check with your Asus representative.”

Thin-and-light productivity laptops have been boasting eight-plus hours of battery life for a while now, so it stands to reason that these Ryzen AI laptops would likely be able to do the same given the slew of improvements AMD has made to its architecture. But laptop makers tend to overpromise and underdeliver when it comes to battery life. An Asus rep listed on this Best Buy page said the Ryzen AI Zenbook S16 gets about 12 hours of battery life, while the Qualcomm Vivobook S15 gets 18 hours — meaning Asus’s flagship AMD laptop sees six hours less than its Qualcomm flagship. Twelve hours is also about six hours less than the MacBook Air M3 managed in my tests.

“I wanted to build notebooks that were faster than the MacBook Pro, thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air,” said AMD’s Jack Huynh, senior vice president and GM of computing and graphics, as he introduced Asus’ Zenbook S16 onstage. But when I finally got to hold the Zenbook S16 in the demo room, it wasn’t feeling lighter and thinner, because apparently it wasn’t.

According to the companies’ spec sheets, the 16-inch Zenbook is similarly heavy and thick as the 15-inch Air: 3.3 lbs (1.5 kg or 1.51 kg) and 0.43 inches or 0.45 inches (1.1 cm or 1.15 cm) thick. (It’s also 0.52 inches wider and 0.32 inches longer.) That’s not to say it’s not impressively thin and light, because it was, but to be truly impressed, I’d have to see Ryzen AI beat the AI ​​for myself.

During one of the two-hour general introductions, AMD boasted that its 50 TOPS NPU is more than five times faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake. (Never mind that Intel’s Lunar Lake NPU, due out this fall, offers up to 48 TOPS.) However, I couldn’t gauge just how much faster AMD’s NPU actually was, compared to competing chips I’d previously tested, since the available demos didn’t run on the NPU.

I demoed two AI programs generating images from typed prompts on the Zenbook S16 and the 13-inch ProArt, but neither program used AMD’s NPU to run the applications. Windows Task Manager showed that either the CPU or integrated graphics was doing most or all of the image generation.

There was also an MSI Prestige laptop demoing webcam effects like background blur and auto emoji, which used 51 percent of the NPU, but still taxed the AMD’s CPU — 78 percent of it, along with nearly half of the laptop’s 32GB of memory. It also couldn’t reliably generate an on-screen emoji based on my facial expression, and when it did, it took several seconds.

One of the most interesting AI apps AMD talked about was Story Cube, Asus’s AI app that will be included with its upcoming ProArt series laptops. The company says the app can automatically retrieve, tag, and sort photos and videos based on who or what is in the photo, or where the photo was taken, using local AI processing on the device.

It also appeared to be available for testing in the demo room — but when I asked an AMD rep to show me in action, they said they couldn’t. Instead, the program showed up in an idle state, as if it had already finished organizing photos.

During both general sessions, AMD claimed its Radeon 890M iGPU could generate 52 fps in Cyberpunk2077 And Red Dead Redemption 2and 72 fps in Forza Horizon 5With AMD Fluid Motion Frames enabled, AMD said it was able to achieve 93 fps in Cyberpunk207790 fps in Red Dead Redemption 2and 148 fps in Forza Horizon 5.

The company shrugged off details on stage (and in some slides) about graphics settings and display resolution until it compared the Radeon 890M plus AFMF to Nvidia’s mobile RTX 2050: full HD (1080p) at medium graphics. When I asked an AMD rep in the demo area if they were using the same settings with AFMF disabled, they said yes.

AMD also claims its new iGPU is faster in gaming than the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100: 1.65 times faster in Cyberpunk2077 and 1.36 times faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The company declined to say which in-game settings it used here. They weren’t mentioned on the slide or in the footnotes at the end of the slide deck.

None of those games were available to demo with the Radeon 890M, so I couldn’t verify any of AMD’s claims. In their place were Autumn 4 And Lies of Pibut I couldn’t verify that any of those games were running at 1080p like AMD said they were or check the graphics presets; they didn’t show up where they normally would in the settings menu. I did notice that Lies of Pi’s The frame rate was stuck at 60 fps when I enabled Steam’s in-game fps counter; Autumn 4 ran between 75 and 95 fps depending on what I was doing in the game.

I asked an AMD representative if it would be possible to Cyberpunk2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raideror some other game they bragged about running on the Radeon 890M, but were told it would be better to wait for a review unit as the performance isn’t representative of the final, out-of-the-box version and that it would take too long to download because the hotel’s Wi-Fi was too slow.

The first laptops with AMD’s Strix Point chips — Asus’ Zenbook S 16, ProArt P16, and ProArt PX13 — will hit shelves on July 28. With MacBooks And With Snapdragon laptops already taking up space on those shelves, this is a pivotal moment for AMD to prove that its x86 Zen 5 architecture can be as fast — or faster — than its competitors’ Arm architectures.

If AMD succeeds, it will put even more pressure on Intel to release Lunar Lake, especially since Intel will also want to prove that its new x86 chips can beat ARM. If AMD fails, it will put more pressure on Intel to show that the old guard of PC chips can still keep up.