In an interview with CRN, AMD's Matt Unangst said he wants business customers to understand the value of AI PCs and how the latest Ryzen Pro processors deliver “best-in-class” performance and battery. He said channel partners had a “very important role” to play in helping. life.
AMD's head of commercial PC business said the company's latest Ryzen processors offer “best-in-class” performance and efficiency in the emerging category of AI PCs. That's a message it expects channel partners to take to the streets in the ongoing battle against rivals like Intel. .
Matt Unangst, senior director of AMD's commercial client and workstation business, made this comment in a recent CRN interview, just before the company launched its Ryzen Pro 8000 series processors for business PCs earlier this month.
[Related: Why Intel Thinks 2024 Is A Big Commercial PC Refresh Year]
Help business customers understand the value of AI PCs and how AMD stacks up, as new processors are expected to arrive in systems from HP Inc., Lenovo, and other OEMs starting this quarter Channel partners have a “very important role” to play in this, Unangst said. space.
“We've really done a lot of engagement, discussion and collaboration with our channel partners across the board to make sure they understand our value. [proposition] our abilities and [product] By doing so, you will be able to clearly communicate to your customers where the industry is going and where your solutions are going. ” he said.
Ryzen Pro 8000 processors incorporate the general-purpose and AI computing advances found in the Ryzen 8000 chips launched a few months ago, and add enterprise-grade remote management and security features such as AMD Memory Guard for enterprise customers. To do.
The Santa Clara, California-based chip designer is making a big commercial push for the chip as Intel tries to protect market share with its competing lineup of AI PCs, the Core Ultra series. At the same time, mobile chip designer Qualcomm plans to reinvigorate the PC market this year with its AI-focused Snapdragon X processor.
AMD's recently launched processors include the Ryzen Pro 8040 series for AI-powered commercial notebooks and the Ryzen Pro 8000 series for AI-powered commercial desktops. Chips in both lineups feature a neural processing unit (NPU) in addition to a CPU and GPU, which Intel says is a key requirement for Microsoft for AI PCs running Windows 11.
Comparison of AMD's Ryzen Pro 8040 and Intel's Core Ultra
Compared to Intel's Core Ultra processors for laptops, AMD claims its Ryzen Pro 8040 chips have advantages in several areas including multitasking, productivity applications, content creation applications, efficiency, and AI inference. .
The company said its Ryzen Pro 8000 desktop chips have similar advantages compared to Intel's 13 chips.th-Gen Core processor. It was released last year, but it doesn't have an NPU. (Intel plans to launch its first line of NPU-powered desktop processors later this year.)
“We can deliver best-in-class performance and best-in-class battery life, meaning energy efficiency, which no one else in the market can say,” said Unangst (pictured above).
AMD said it has proven this in several benchmark tests measuring general performance.
For example, when compared to Intel's 15-watt Core Ultra 7 165U for laptops, AMD says its 15-watt Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U is 18% faster in the Geekbench v6 single-core test and 19% faster in the Geekbench v6 multi-core test. It was announced that it was fast. The company says it has increased speed by 43% on multitasking core tests and his Blender Classroom, which measures CPU rendering performance.
AMD said the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U, designed for thin and light laptops, could even outperform Intel's Core Ultra 7 165H, which draws nearly twice as much power at 28 watts.
AMD says the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U has an even bigger performance lead over the Core Ultra 7 165U across productivity benchmarks, from a 67% advantage in Procyon Office's Excel and PowerPoint tests to Procyon's Outlook He said this extends to a 76% advantage in testing.
In terms of efficiency, AMD says the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U runs Microsoft Teams video conference calls and Microsoft Office applications 69 percent faster simultaneously using 55 percent more power compared to Intel's Core Ultra 7 165H. I insisted that I could.
AMD says that turning on NPU-enabled AI effects for Microsoft Teams in this workflow will improve Ryzen processor speed by 72% and reduce power consumption by 84%.
Regarding battery life, AMD said that the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U-powered laptop can last 7 hours and 21 minutes while performing a Microsoft Teams video conference call. In contrast, AMD says a laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 7 165U can last only 5 hours and 9 minutes under the same operation.
In terms of AI performance, AMD says the 15-watt Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U outperforms the 28-watt Core Ultra 7 155H by 4% on the MobileNetV3 computer vision model, 17% on the Deeplabv3 image segmentation model, and 44% on the Deeplabv3 image segmentation model. % was said to be superior. It was 79% for the Procyon AI Float32 benchmark and 79% for the YoloV8 computer vision model.
Regarding large language models, AMD didn't have performance data for the Ryzen Pro 8040 series, but the previous lineup's processor, the 15-watt Ryzen 7 Pro 7840U, allows for 14% more tokens per second. The 7 billion parameter Llama 2 model achieved 79% faster time to first token compared to Intel's 28-core Core Ultra 7 155H.that
Older Ryzen chips also delivered 17% more tokens per second and 41% faster time to first token for the 7 billion parameter Mistal AI model. According to AMD, this is similar to the GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT.
AMD says the AI computing benefits of the Ryzen Pro 8040 series are realized in part through the processor's ability to achieve up to 39 tera operations per second (TOPS) across the chip and up to 16 TOPS on the NPU alone. In contrast, Intel's Core Ultra processors totaled 34 TOPS, the highest on NPUs at 11 TOPS, the company said.
“When you layer that Ryzen AI technology on top of that, you're taking what is already a leader-class product, either in notebooks or desktops, and applying that best-in-class AI technology to it. More and more applications are making use of it,” Unangst said.
While AMD has primarily focused on Intel in its competitive comparisons, the company knows Qualcomm could be a game-changer with its upcoming Snapdragon X processors.
“We expect them to have strong capabilities. We take that very seriously,” the senior director said. “We are constantly evaluating our roadmap and technology. We are very happy with where we are right now, given the technology we have and our ability to compete and win on both performance and battery life. Masu.”
Unangst said AMD also feels “fantastic” about its AI technology, “both in terms of what's on the market now and how that technology will advance over the next few years.”
Engineering work with ISVs is a “foundational part” of AMD strategy
As software enablement is key to success in the AI PC category, AMD said it is working with more than 150 independent software vendors (ISVs) on AI-powered applications that can take advantage of the latest Ryzen processors.
These ISVs range from large companies such as Adobe, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom to smaller companies such as BufferZone, Bitdefender, Splashtop, and Nero. In contrast, Intel said it is working with more than 100 ISVs on more than 300 AI-powered features for PCs with Core Ultra processors.
“Engagement is consistently growing and expanding, both in terms of experience and the number of specific ISVs we work with,” Unangst said.
Unangst said AMD works with these ISVs on an engineering level and considers this a “fundamental part” of the company's work with developers.
“Starting with the Ryzen 7040, we have provided a lot of demo hardware for you to use to prototype and optimize your applications, and our latest additions go even further. [Ryzen] 8040,” he said.
For AMD, enabling ISVs also requires close collaboration with OEMs.
“We also work closely with our OEM partners to ensure that our strategy in terms of who we engage with and what we focus on aligns with theirs and where they see the market direction. We made sure it made sense,” Unangst said.
A key aspect of AMD's work with ISVs is the company's development software, namely AMD Ryzen AI software. This allows developers to take pre-trained AI models, quantize them, and run them in live applications using the open source ONNX runtime.
The inclusion of NPUs in the latest Ryzen processors represents a new paradigm for AMD's personal computing strategy, but the company's software is asking developers whether they should map AI capabilities to NPUs, or whether they should be mapped to traditional It's intended to help you decide what to map to your engine, Unangst said.
“Because there are actually a number of AI workloads that make sense to run on GPUs. And there are some that make sense to run on NPUs,” he said.
“So we're not really focused on how do we move all the AI experiences to the NPU? We're really focused on how do we move those experiences to the right IP? We are focused on providing the best experience possible,” he added.
