You'll be able to run Copilot+ PCs with new AMD Ryzen AI 300. The best AI chip at the moment?

When Microsoft arrived with an announcement for its Copilot+ PCs, the excitement was running high. Initially, the so-called future of computing will run properly with the AI-friendly Snapdragon X Elite. But now, it seems like we’re getting a new competitor in town: the AMD Ryzen AI 300 processors.

Announced during June’s Computex 2024 event, the new AMD Ryzen AI 300 chips get up to 12 high-performance cores and 24 threads that are built on AMD XDNA 2 architecture and have an NPU with up to 50 peak TOPS. For a comparison context, Snapdragon X Elite boasts 12 cores with 12 threads with a Hexagon NPU that could deliver 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second).

AMD also said that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 & Ryzen AI 9 365 are the first processors in the series, which will come out later this July. The refreshed versions of Vivobook S14 (M5406), Vivobook S15 (M5506), and Vivobook S (M5606) will all have AMD’s latest AI chip powering them.

An NPU is an important thing to look at, especially for the so-called AI PCs. Because, compared to the classic GPU/CPU combo in laptops launched years before, the NPU is what makes these new lineups different from the rest. It allows efficient & local execution of large AI models locally on the device using less power and less resource.

Besides, the Ryzen chip makers also announced the AMD Ryzen 9000 Series desktop processors, which will be available starting next month. Made especially for gamers and content creators, these chips are said to have a better IPC (instructions per clock) than their predecessors, like Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 7 7700X, by 16.