In a keynote speech yesterday, AMD chief executive officer Lisa Su kicked off CES with a number of announcements of new mobile and desktop processors designed to elevate the power of AI (artificial intelligence), gaming, adaptive computing, and sustainable computing.
Despite the challenges, the pandemic reminded us of the omnipresence of semiconductors in our lives, Su noted. “Virtually every product, every service, every experience in our lives is powered by semiconductors. Whether you’re talking about cloud services, or how we work, game and connect, chips have become a critical enabler of everything in our modern life.”
AI
AMD announced the new AMD Ryzen 7040 Series Processors for ultrathin PC laptops, which integrates a dedicated on-chip AI engine, called Ryzen AI. Ryzen AI is an “industry-first AI hardware for X86 processors,” stated Su.
The Ryzen 7040 Series chips have up to eight “Zen 4” cores, integrated AMD RDNA 3 graphics architecture, and is capable of delivering up to 12 trillion AI operations per second, Su said.
In a demonstration, Su boasted of the high performance delivered by Ryzen 7040, which she said is “30 per cent faster than Apple (M2) and 45 per cent faster than AMD’s X86 competition.”
Su was also joined on stage by Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief product officer Panos Panay, who teased the integration of AI in Windows using AMD’s processors to “reinvent everything you do on Windows and deliver the best experiences to customers.”
Gaming
AMD unveiled the AMD Ryzen 7045HX Series processors for gamers and creators looking for high performance on a notebook. Ryzen 7045HX is powered by up to 16 “Zen 4” cores, 32 threads and is built on 5 nanometer process technology. It offers DDR5 (Double Data Rate 5) memory support.
In addition, to power 1080p gaming at ultra settings and content creation applications, AMD announced the AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series Graphics for laptops. Built on AMD RDNA 3 architecture, the Radeon RX 7000 is designed to achieve “the best balance of performance and battery life across a wide range of system designs,” affirmed Su.
Ryzen 50800 X3D CPUs, announced last year, used 3D packaging to stack memory on top of CPUs (central processing units) in order to deliver more performance in gaming. This year, AMD announced the AMD Ryzen 7000 Series X3D to bring the power of 3D V-Cache technology to the Ryzen 7000 Series desktop lineup with the addition of three new X3D processors.
Su also announced the bundling of Respawn’s upcoming Star Wars Jedi Survivor game with select Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, starting later this month.
Adaptive computing
Su was joined on stage by Bob DeSantis from medical company Intuitive Surgical, who explained how AMD’s technology has been key to improving surgical processes, optimizing robotic surgeries, motion control, visual controls and safety mechanisms.
Peggy Johnson, chief executive officer of augmented reality solutions provider Magic Leap also stressed the importance of high performance processors in delivering highly immersive AR such as that used in digital twins, as well as 3D visualizations of data or surgical plans for patients.
And former NASA astronaut Dr. Katie Coleman highlighted the impact of AMD’s high performance and adaptive computing in powering the future of space exploration.
Sustainable Computing
Su highlighted how AMD is bringing sustainable computing to the largest data centers in the world. AMD Instinct MI300, announced yesterday, is an integrated data center APU (accelerated processing unit), leveraging 3D chiplet design combining AMD CDNA 3 GPU (graphics processing unit), “Zen 4” CPU and HBM (high bandwidth memory) chiplets, designed for energy-efficient AI training performance and HPC (high performance computing) workloads.
Furthermore, AMD announced the preview of the Alveo V70 AI Accelerator, a video analytics AI accelerator based on AMD XDNA with AI Engine architecture, for data center and cloud deployments.