AMD is taking a hit on its biggest competitors with its goal of providing the best AI PC experience to users around the world.
As AI becomes more commonplace in our professional and personal lives, the need for the right hardware to benefit from its advancements has never been more important.
AI PCs will likely be the primary way many consumers experience this technology first-hand, with platforms like Microsoft's Copilot+ delivering productivity and efficiency benefits to everyone.
Opportunity
In a highly competitive market, AMD is keen to assert its leadership, with a key company spokesman saying: Tech Radar Pro That's the only way we can deliver the full hardware experience.
“We're probably the only company that has all three of those elements,” asserted Jack Huynh, SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics at AMD, noting that among its rivals, Nvidia has yet to unveil a serious challenger in the APU market, and Intel is in a similar situation when it comes to data center GPUs.
“We're moving as quickly as we can because there's an opportunity in the arms race,” Huynh added, highlighting AMD's string of new product releases and announcements at Computex 2024, particularly the Ryzen AI 300 series, as evidence of its ambition.
“Part of our vision is that the same IP that runs the data center, the cloud and the edge will enable not only engineering efficiencies but also improved security, which is what enterprises care about.”
Huynh noted that AMD is particularly focused on talking to software companies to understand their needs when it comes to AI PCs, naming Adobe, Zoom, Microsoft and others as key partners.
“Our goal is to catch up aggressively in the next three to five years,” he said. “Right now, we're overinvesting in software.”
This includes the bold goal of creating a unified software architecture for the NPU, with Huynh explaining that AMD wants to make it easy for developers to build with the NPU that offers the best performance per watt.
“Our goal is to get the best of both worlds, with the fastest time to adoption,” he said. “We don't just want to build a solution to a problem; we want to really understand what developers want to do and what they want to achieve.”
AI PC Journey
Huynh acknowledged that AI PCs will require more education from OEMs and companies like AMD for them to appeal to the mass market, especially as customers are typically asked to spend more money than they have in the past on new devices.
He noted that AMD is in no rush when it comes to developing AI PCs, saying, “This is going to require a tremendous amount of education, but to me this is just the beginning, it's a journey and we're excited about it. We think we're going to regenerate the PC and maintain this AI leadership.”
“It's very important that we launch our product when it's ready. We believe we have one chance to prove to end users that AI PC is an innovative product.”
“AI is moving 10 times faster than the internet. AI is the new electricity, it will be everywhere and it will power everything. So it's really important for us now to be an AI-first company.”
