On Wednesday, January 4th, AMD chairman and CEO Lisa Su took the stage to give a keynote speech on the advancements in technology AMD had made this year. We got to learn about new products and features that utilize AI to expand the capabilities of AMD technology. Su goes on to say “There’s so much transformation happening right now. These experiences need to empower and amplify what people can do with tech and I can certainly say we’re really on that path already.”
First, Su reveals the new processor chip that AMD has been working on, the AMD XDNA. This chip will be in the new AMD Ryzen 7040 series and it’s the world’s first ultra-thin processor that will be in AMD’s notebook devices. Su helped the chip in her hand to give the audience a visual of how small the chip was and it was smaller than the palm of her hand. She goes on to say how this new chip is faster than the previous Ryzen chips and Apple M1 Pro chips.
To further prove her point, Su shows a demonstration of a picture being rendered from the Blender software application, and the new chip left Apple’s M1 in the dust when rendering out photos. This speed is great for creatives that despise long render times and can speed up their workflow. My favorite feature that was mentioned was the Ryzen 7040’s long battery life of 30+ hours. I always prefer to have a laptop with a longer battery life so I don’t have to constantly look for an outlet after using my laptop for three or more hours. While this sounds amazing, consumers will have to wait until March 2023 before the notebook laptop is on the market. Su mentions that there will be around 250 devices with the new chip installed and each model will have different designs.
In the area of gaming, AMD has some big plans that will make gamers happy. The Ryzen 7045 HX series is AMD’s first mobile CPU based on a chipless design. Su said, “It’s for gamers and creators who want the highest possible performance in a notebook laptop.” The HX series has up to 16 cores with a boot speed of 5.4 gigahertz and 80 megabytes of on-chip memory. While the previous generation Ryzen 6900 hX series had 1080p gaming, the 7945 HX has 24% higher performance across a range of popular games. When it comes to content creation and productivity applications the 7945 HX is more than 50% faster thanks to the 16 zen 4 cores in the laptop. Another product that will be released is the AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT which provides a higher frame rate for 1080p gaming and is 26% faster than other competitors.
AMD also revealed it has partnerships with multiple companies like HP and Microsoft. Panos Panay EVP and Chief Product Officer of Microsoft came to the stage to talk about how AMD and Microsoft have collaborated again this year. He revealed that the Xbox X and S series are powered by AMD technology and is grateful that both companies came together to create these consoles. Then he segued into the importance of AI by saying “AI is the defining technology of this generation and computing has become more personal [because of AI].” Panay said that Windows Studio Effects has benefitted from the help of AI with AI’s video enhancements. Some of the enhancements include portrait blur so the subject is the main focus of the video while the background is blurred out, automatic framing which keeps the subject centered in videos, and eye contact mode. All of these enhancements require trillions of operations per second, but with AI the enhancements can run smoothly without exhausting the GPU or CPU when running. This means that the device won’t have to sacrifice battery life or performance to run these AI enhancements.
AMD has a promising future with all the new products that it is bringing to the consumer electronics world. Su closed out the keynote and noted that “AI is the defining technology of our time. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” Meaning that this is just the beginning of what AI can do and AMD has more plans to incorporate it into technology in the future.
