At an event in China earlier today AMD shared its AI PC ecosystem plans. The Beijing AI PC Innovation Summit saw the introduction of the Ryzen 'Hawk Point' 8040 series and 8000G desktop solutions to the Chinese market and, perhaps more interestingly to us, new AMD roadmaps including the next-gen consumer Ryzen chips. These codenamed 'Strix Point' chips will combine the charms of Zen 5, RDNA 3+, and XDNA 2 processing.
AMD CEO Lisa Su began her presentation on the now-familiar theme of artificial intelligence driving a revolution touching every corner of the tech industry. AMD has a wide range of AI accelerating processors covering the data center to AI PCs to the edge, but as this event was meant to introduce the latest Ryzen chips to China (and with partners like Asus and Lenovo taking part in the summit) we got a pleasingly large chunk of discussion about PCs.
Above you can see two of the key moments of Su's presentation. She had talked earlier at some length regarding Hawk Point (second slide) but above you can see that she revealed the "Next-Gen AMD Ryzen" chips codenamed Strix Point. It is good to see the CPU, GPU, and NPU cores are all upgraded beyond the current state-of-the-art Ryzen 8040 family
AMD's SVP of GPU Technology and Engineering R&D, David Wang, was next on stage to dive a little deeper into the newly official RDNA 3+ and XDNA 2 architectures. It really was just a little deeper, as he mainly talked about the current-gen Hawk Point. For example, perhaps the biggest thing we learned about RDNA 3+ was its name... Previously we have reported on sightings of RDNA 3.5 drivers, but now it looks like the GPU series also sometimes identified as GFX115X will be dubbed RDNA 3+. Without a major version number update, we expect only slight tweaks to the now-familiar RDNA 3 in the upcoming Hawk Point APUs.
Moving along to XDNA 2 information, we learned that this new NPU will offer triple the performance of a current-gen XDNA NPU. For reference, we know that the AMD Ryzen 8040 series delivers 16 NPU TOPS for 39 total TOPS. A quick calculation indicates that the next-gen Ryzen APUs should deliver over 70 total TOPS. Intel's Core Ultra series "delivers up to 34 TOPS," and Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite chips are supposedly capable of 45 TOPS.
AMD's Strix Point processors are set for launch and release later this year. Intel's Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs will also arrive in 2024 – packing three times more AI performance via both GPU and NPU enhancements.
