We’re only halfway through 2024, and there’s no sign of AI-related announcements slowing down — especially with Computex 2024 here. This year’s Taipei-based convention starts on June 4th and ends on June 7th, and you can expect to see big keynotes from AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia, and Arm detailing their upcoming strategies for processors that better handle the AI workloads we’re increasingly foisting on computers.
Prior to Computex, we heard a lot about new Copilot Plus PC laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips, a bunch of new Microsoft Copilot features, and where Apple slots into the AI bandwagon now that it has competition from another Arm processor.
Keep on scrolling for all the latest news out of Computex.
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AMD’s next generation of AI laptop processors have a new name too
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Image: AMD
AMD announced at Computex 2024 its next generation of Ryzen laptop processors for generative AI workloads: the Ryzen AI 300 Series. It’s a re-brand of its top-tier Ryzen 9 chips. The new naming convention still includes the HX suffix AMD introduced in 2022, but it doesn’t indicate how many watts of power the chip draws. Instead, HX will simply refer to “top of stack” or the best and fastest Ryzen AI 300 chip.
The new Ryzen AI chips are built on AMD’s latest architectures for neural, integrated graphics, and general processing: XDNA2 for the NPU, RDNA 3.5 for the iGPU, which now has up to 16 compute units, and Zen 5 for the CPU. The first two processors in this series are the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365. Both have 50 TOPS NPU, but the HX variant is the higher-end of the two.
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AMD’s first Zen 5 CPU is the ‘monster’ Ryzen 9 9950X
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Image: AMD
AMD is launching its first Zen 5 desktop processors in July, with the Ryzen 9 9950X flagship leading the pack as “the world’s most powerful desktop consumer processor.” Based on AMD’s existing AM5 platform, the new Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs include the Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X.
The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU, with 80MB of L2+L3 cache and a 5.7GHz boost clock. AMD is promising around a 16 percent instructions per cycle (IPC) uplift in performance over the previous-generation Ryzen CPUs, with big promises of performance gains in productivity as well as gaming.
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Nvidia’s G-Assist is an AI chatbot that guides you through games and optimizes your PC
When Nvidia first announced G-Assist it was an April Fools’ prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant being able to help you play a game while you ran to the door for your pizza delivery. Now, seven years later, G-Assist is back as a real demo of a powerful GeForce AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RTX GPU owners.
Project G-Assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it’s a brief look at how an AI assistant could guide you through PC games and even configure optimal settings for you based on chat inputs in the future.
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Nvidia and AMD are bringing Microsoft’s Copilot Plus AI features to gaming laptops
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Nvidia leans into RTX AI PCs. Image: Nvidia
Nvidia and AMD are gearing up to launch gaming laptops that include the AI Copilot Plus features that Microsoft just announced for Qualcomm-powered laptops. At Computex today, Nvidia briefly teased that “RTX AI PC” laptops are on the way from Asus and MSI that will eventually include Copilot Plus PC features.
“Newly announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and power-efficient systems-on-a-chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities,” says Nvidia in a blog post. Nvidia confirmed to The Verge in a briefing that these laptops will come with AMD’s latest Strix CPUs.