AMD’s latest Ryzen chips best Snapdragon X Elite on AI

Ben Schoon | Jun 3 2024 - 9:15 am PT

The AI race is on for Windows laptops and, after Microsoft bet the first generation of “Copilot+ PCs” on Qualcomm, AMD is stepping up with Ryzen AI 300, a series of chips that pack more AI power than the Snapdragon X Elite.

The move to Windows on Arm is in large part about battery life, but it’s also about AI. That’s thanks to the powerful NPU in the Snapdragon X Elite which hits 45 TOPS. That’s a high mark on the measurement of how many operations per second the NPU can handle.

AMD is now beating that, the company claims.

With the new AMD Ryzen AI 300 series, the company says that it can handle 50 TOPS. That beats the Snapdragon X Elite and means that laptops powered by these new chips qualify as Copilot+ PCs with Microsoft’s additional features such as “Recall.”

These new Ryzen chips are the first of AMD’s “Zen 5” architecture, with the AI focus primarily being on laptops. On other machines, the new chips will be the Ryzen 9000 series. AMD explains:

Built on the new AMD XDNA 2 architecture, this new NPU offers 50 TOPS of AI processing power, surpassing Copilot+ AI PC requirements, with three times the AI engine performance of the second generation of AMD Ryzen AI. Powered by new “Zen 5” architecture, these processors come equipped with up to 12 high-performance CPU cores with 24 threads and 50% more on-chip L3 cache memory over previous gen “Zen 4” processors for thin and light laptops. With advanced AI architecture and supercharged performance for elite gaming and productivity, the third gen Ryzen AI Series enables the ultimate in private, responsive, and intelligent laptop computing.

This new series of chips wil bring improvements to overall performance, but AMD isn’t making any big claims on battery life for laptops besides calling it “exceptional” and “without compromise.”

AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 is a 10-core chip with 5.0GHz boost clock speed while the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 will boost that with a 12-core design and 5.1GHz boost. The most powerful desktop chip AMD announced was the Ryzen 9 9950X, which is a 16-core chip with 5.7GHz boost.

Asus has already announced that the Zenbook S 16 will utilize the Ryzen AI chips and be one of the first AMD-powered Copilot+ PCs when it launches in July. Pre-orders are open now starting at $1,399 with Ryzen 9 AI 365 and 24GB of RAM.

These new chips will also be coming to other Asus laptops (including ROG) as well as from HP, Lenovo, and MSI.