AMD Outdoes Qualcomm: AMD Unveils Zen 5 and Ryzen AI 300

AMD kicks off Computex in style. The chip manufacturer unveils the Ryzen 9000 desktop processor built on the Zen5 architecture and sets a new standard for NPUs.

It had been a while since AMD made a significant announcement. AMD is seeing its market share grow against Intel, but at the same time, Qualcomm is increasingly asserting itself in the market. It was high time for AMD to make a splash, and the Computex computer fair in Taiwan provided the ideal opportunity.

AMD’s keynote did not go unnoticed. With the announcement of Zen5 and the Ryzen 9000 chips, AMD is ready to further intensify the battle with Intel in the desktop segment. The Ryzen AI 300, in turn, is set to challenge Qualcomm in the emerging NPU market.

Ryzen 9000: most Powerful Desktop Processor to Date?

The Ryzen 9000 processors mark the official launch of Zen 5, AMD’s new chip architecture. Ryzen 9000 is the direct successor to the Ryzen 7000 series, built on Zen 4 and introduced a couple of years ago. AMD primarily promises incremental improvements in CPU performance: at the same clock speeds, Zen 5 is up to 16 percent faster than Zen 4, which in turn achieved a performance leap of 29 percent compared to Zen 3.

The Ryzen 9950X is the flagship of the series, and AMD unhesitatingly calls it the most powerful processor you can put in a desktop. The difference from the Ryzen 7950X is not in the number of cores or clock speeds, but in the number of operations the processor can handle per cycle (IPC). The Ryzen 9950X is accompanied by three other processors.

AMD does not include an NPU in the Ryzen 9000 processors, unlike the Ryzen 8000 desktop processors launched earlier this year. An integrated GPU is provided. The manufacturer showcases benchmarks to demonstrate the Ryzen 9950X’s superiority over the Intel Core i9-14900K and also claims double PCIe 5 bandwidth.

AMD will only be able to prove these bold claims once the first PCs featuring Ryzen 9000 processors are released. This is expected to happen starting this summer.

Ryzen AI 300: Even more TOPS

The Ryzen 9000 is aimed at the desktop market, but with the Ryzen AI 300, AMD aims to conquer the laptop market. Qualcomm caught Intel and AMD off guard when Microsoft introduced the Copilot Plus specification during Build. According to Microsoft, only Copilot Plus PCs are worthy of the ‘AI PC’ name, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X is the reference processor.

AMD, at least, has a quick response. The Ryzen AI 300 is a CPU for laptops, but its NPU for accelerating AI workloads is its central feature. AMD showcases two processors within the new series: the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 comes with 12 CPU and GPU cores, while the Ryzen AI 9 365 is equipped with 10 CPU and 12 GPU cores.

However, it’s not about the number of cores: AMD showcases the number of TOPS (tera operations per second). The Ryzen AI 300 chips boast 50 TOPS. This is significantly more than the limit of the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X (45 TOPS) and Intel Lunar Lake (40-45 TOPS), although Intel itself claims a lot more. We continue to emphasize that all those TOPS in your PC do not currently enable world-changing applications.

New Name

Finally, AMD is also making an adjustment to its naming scheme. How AMD numbers its chips is impossible to decipher even for experienced chip experts. Every digit or letter in the chip’s name should tell you something about the chip’s characteristics. Two years ago, AMD already revamped the naming scheme, but that still didn’t provide enough clarity.

The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is the first chip in the new scheme. The digit 9 indicates that it is a top model (Ryzen 9), and the HX further emphasizes this: AMD will use HX to designate higher-performance chips. The last three digits indicate the processor number: 3 stands for the generation and 70 for the SKU.