AMD claims its top-tier Ryzen AI chip is faster than Apple’s M3 Pro

2024 will go down in technology history as the year Microsoft finally succeeded in creating Windows. Laptops are becoming serious competitors to the MacBook. So far, it is thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chipswhich adopted a homogenous chip architecture, increased clock speeds, and caught up with Apple’s fast, power-efficient processors. But now AMD says it has chips that can also compete with the MacBook — and keep the company’s processors in the race.

Last week, AMD held a two-day event in Los Angeles to reveal details about its new Strix Point Ryzen AI chips based on its all-new Zen 5 architecture. Zen 5 is supposed to be a major step up from AMD’s last-generation chip architecture, delivering more instructions per clock cycle and higher gaming frame rates on just 15W of power.

At that event, I heard AMD boast about beating the MacBook more than I’ve ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed that its new Ryzen chip “exceeds what the MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming”; “is 15% faster than the M3 Pro” in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, “unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to just two displays.”

But AMD didn’t just announce its next product to journalists. Ryzen AI Chips AMD said its new integrated graphics processors are not only faster than Apple’s M3 and M3 Pro, but also beat Qualcomm’s current-generation and Intel’s previous-generation GPUs, while also noting that they can run “triple-A games in full HD,” including titles that “simply don’t run on some of our competitors.” AMD also claimed its NPU performs 50 trillion floating-point operations per second, more than any of its Microsoft Copilot Plus laptop competitors will offer this year.

But if they are faster, AMD still has to really prove it.

The games that AMD claimed ran faster on its new iGPU weren’t available for me to test at the event. Most of AMD’s AI demos didn’t actually run on AMD’s NPU, and the ones that did weren’t responsive. The most interesting of AMD’s AI demos—Asus’ automatic file consolidation and organization program—wasn’t available to try at all, and AMD’s most powerful gaming laptop on display ran its games on Nvidia graphics with Nvidia upscaling, not its own integrated graphics.

Multiple AMD spokespersons gave me varying answers as to why none of this was available: the demo laptops aren’t representative of the final product; Asus may be working on some final BIOS tweaks; the hotel’s Wi-Fi is too slow to install other games; they didn’t know why some of the AI-powered apps weren’t running on the NPU.

While I didn’t get to see these Ryzen AI chips in action, here’s what I got to see at the event.

It looks like Ryzen’s AI could be significantly faster than AMD’s previous generation of laptop chips. AMD claims that the new Zen 5 The processor architecture provides an average of 16% more instructions per clock cycle (IPC), executing tasks much faster without having to increase the chip’s clock speed.

And while its CPU cores only offer a 10% IPC boost in a sample game (Far Cry 6), AMD says its new RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture gives these chips between 19 and 32 percent more graphics performance per watt at 15 watts, which is the power that the thinnest laptops and portable gaming systems typically use by default. Compared to the previous generation, the integrated graphics should theoretically be able to generate more frames per second or use less power, or a bit of both.

While AMD’s chips are theoretically more efficient than before, AMD hasn’t confirmed whether these machines will get any further battery life improvements. At the event, AMD only said that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “eight hours or more.” I wasn’t able to speak to an Asus representative at the event to get an actual number for the laptops on display, and AMD seemed hesitant to give me an answer other than to “check with my Asus rep.”

Thin and light laptops have been able to deliver over eight hours of battery life for a while now, so it makes sense that these Ryzen AI laptops can likely do the same given the many improvements AMD has made to its architecture. But laptop makers typically overpromise and underdeliver when it comes to battery life. An Asus representative on the subject Best Buy Page According to Asus, the Ryzen AI Zenbook S16 gets about 12 hours of battery life, while the Qualcomm Vivobook S15 gets 18 hours, meaning Asus’ flagship AMD laptop gets six hours less than its Qualcomm flagship. Twelve hours is also about six hours less than what the MacBook Air M3 got in my testing.

“I wanted to make laptops that were faster than the MacBook Pro and thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air,” said Jack Huynh, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of computing and graphics, as he introduced the Asus Zenbook S16 on stage. But when I finally got to hold the Zenbook S16 in the demo area, it didn’t feel quite as capable. feel lighter and thinner, because apparently it wasn’t.

According to company data sheetsThe 16-inch Zenbook has the same weight and thickness as Air 15 inch: 1.5 kg or 1.51 kg and 1.1 cm or 1.15 cm thick. (It’s also 0.52 inches wider and 0.32 inches longer.) That’s not to say it wasn’t incredibly thin and light, because it was — but for me to be truly impressed, I’ll have to see Ryzen AI beat its competitors with my own eyes.

During one of the two-hour keynote presentations, AMD boasted that its 50 TOPS NPU was more than five times faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake. (Never mind that Intel’s Lunar Lake NPU, coming this fall, offers up to 48 TOPS.) But I couldn’t get a good sense of how fast AMD’s NPU actually is compared to competing chips I’ve tested before, because the available demos didn’t run on the NPU.

I demonstrated two AI programs that generated images from input prompts on the Zenbook S16 and the ProArt 13-inch, but neither program used AMD’s NPU to run the applications. Windows Task Manager showed that the CPU or integrated graphics card was doing most or all of the image generation.

There was also an MSI Prestige laptop that demonstrated webcam effects like background blur and automatic emojis, using 51% of the NPU in the process, but AMD’s CPU was still strained — 78% of it, as well as nearly half of the laptop’s 32GB of memory. It also couldn’t reliably generate an on-screen emoji based on my facial expression, and when it did, it took several seconds.

One of the most interesting AI applications AMD talked about was History CubeAsus’ AI-powered app bundled with its upcoming ProArt series laptops; the company claims it can automatically retrieve, tag, and sort photos and videos based on who or what is in the photo or where the photo was taken, using local on-device AI processing.

It also appeared to be available for testing in the demo area, but when I asked an AMD representative to show me it in action, they told me they couldn’t. Instead, I was shown the program in idle mode, as if it had already finished organizing the photos.

During its two general sessions, AMD claimed that its Radeon 890M iGPU could generate 52 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 And Red Dead Redemption 2and 72 frames per second in Forza Horizon 5With AMD Fluid Motion Frames enabled, AMD said it could achieve 93 frames per second Cyberpunk 207790 frames per second in Red Dead Redemption 2and 148 fps in Forza Horizon 5.

The company didn’t specify on stage (or on some slides) the graphics settings and display resolution until it got to its comparison between the Radeon 890M plus AFMF and Nvidia’s mobile RTX 2050: Full HD (1080p) on medium graphics. When I asked an AMD rep in the demo area if the same settings were used with AFMF off, they said yes.

AMD also claims that its new iGPU performs faster in games than the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100: 1.65 times faster in Cyberpunk 2077 and 1.36 times faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The company wouldn’t specify what game settings it used here. They weren’t mentioned on the slide or in the footnotes at the end of the presentation.

None of these games were available for demo with the Radeon 890M, so I couldn’t verify any of AMD’s claims. In their place were Fallout 4 And Pi’s Liesbut I couldn’t verify if any of these games ran at 1080p like AMD said or check the graphics presets; they didn’t appear where they normally would in the settings menu. I noticed that Pi’s Lies the frame rate was locked at 60fps when I enabled Steam’s in-game frame rate counter; Fallout 4 ran between 75 and 95 frames per second depending on what I was doing in game.

I asked an AMD representative if it would be possible to run Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raideror any other game he was bragging about on the Radeon 890M, but was told it would be best to wait for a review unit as the performance is not indicative of the final out-of-the-box version and that it would take too long to download as the hotel’s Wi-Fi was too slow.

The first laptops powered by AMD’s Strix Point chips — the Asus Zenbook S 16, ProArt P16, and ProArt PX13 — will hit stores on July 28. Along with MacBooks And With Snapdragon laptops already taking up space on those shelves, this is a crucial moment for AMD to prove that its Zen 5 x86 architecture can be just as fast – or faster – than its competitors’ Arm architecture.

If AMD succeeds, it will put even more pressure on Intel ahead of its Lunar Lake release, especially since Intel also wants to prove Its new x86 chips can beat Arm. If AMD can’t, Intel will have to show again that the old guard of PC chips can still keep up.