The cooperation between Intel and AMD has its limits, and AMD's recent announcement comes in heavy competition with Intel in the enterprise market.
Just a few days ago, AMD and Intel set up an " x86 ecosystem advisory group " with a host of big tech names including Broadcom, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat. The group's stated aim is to: " improve customer choice and compatibility between hardware and software...] simplify architectural guidelines to improve software consistency and standardize interfaces between Intel and AMD x86 product offerings [...] enable greater and more efficient integration of new functionality into operating systems, frameworks and applications ".
Ryzen AI PRO 300 in detail © AMD
A laudable goal that seemed to obscure the fact that the two American firms have been competitors in the microprocessor sector for over 40 years. Fortunately, AMD's latest chip announcements are a wake-up call to the reality of the fierce competition between AMD and Intel. The company headed by Lisa Su has unveiled its new Ryzen AI PRO 300 range of processors for enterprise notebooks. A total of three processors are currently planned. The Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375 will be the most powerful, with 12 cores (4 Zen 5 cores + 8 Zen 5c cores) and a boosted clock frequency of 5.1 GHz. It will also feature an integrated Radeon 890M graphics solution and, most importantly, an XDNA 2 neural unit (or NPU) capable of delivering 55 TOPS. This remarkable power is not quite matched by the second model, the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370: it's identical to the previous model, except for the NPU, which delivers "only" 50 TOPS. Finally, the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 closes the gap with its 8 cores (4 Zen 5 cores + 4 Zen 5c cores), 5 GHz boost frequency, Radeon 880M iGPU and NPU identical to the previous model, at 50 TOPS.
The three launch models of the Ryzen AI PRO 300 range © AMD
These three models are designed to power notebooks aimed primarily at professionals. Logically, AMD is highlighting the XDNA 2 NPU, which feeds the artificial intelligence aspect that is becoming increasingly important as Microsoft seeks to deploy a whole host of AI technologies with its Copilot+ for Windows. For AMD, the question is all the more vital as companies other than Intel are joining the fray. Shortly before the summer, for example, it was Qualcomm that presented its Snapdragon chips for PC laptops, which were widely promoted by Microsoft during its first Copilot+ presentations. At the time, AMD had nothing to offer, but this is clearly no longer the case.
