(Bloomberg) — Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is accelerating the introduction of new artificial intelligence processors as it challenges Nvidia Corp.’s dominance. wants to encroach on that lucrative market.
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The MI325X will hit the market in the fourth quarter, CEO Lisa Su said in the opening keynote of the Computex conference in Taiwan. That chip, the successor to the MI300, will have more memory and faster data throughput, the company said. MI350 will follow in 2025 and the MI400 model a year after that. The move to a roughly annual release cycle is in line with Nvidia’s plans, as CEO Jensen Huang outlined in a speech in Taipei the night before.
AMD is among the companies rushing to bring new products to market, aiming to tap into the flow of money pouring into new AI training systems, money currently spent mainly on Nvidia’s offerings. Su said the company continues to see strong demand for its existing MI300 products and that its new models will compare favorably with competing offerings.
Santa Clara-based AMD has shown the most progress among the group chasing Nvidia. AMD has raised its sales target for so-called AI accelerators to $4 billion this year. That rapid rise from virtually nothing last year still pales in comparison to Nvidia. Nvidia’s data center unit alone is on track to achieve annual revenue that is estimated to exceed $100 billion, exceeding the combined total annual revenue of AMD and Intel Corp. will surpass.
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For consumers, AMD talked about its third-generation Ryzen AI processors, called Strix Point, which will go on sale from July. These are tailor-made for laptops and combine RDNA 3.5 mobile graphics, XDNA 2 neural processing units for accelerating AI tasks and the latest Zen 5 processing cores. Su invited a series of partners to the stage – from HP Inc. CEO Enrique Lores and Lenovo Group Ltd. Executive Vice President Luca Rossi to Asustek Computer Inc. chairman Jonney Shih – to discuss upcoming machines running AMD’s new Ryzen platform.
AMD showed off a slide suggesting its latest Ryzen system will perform better on AI tasks than Qualcomm Inc.’s Snapdragon . Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri also joined Su on stage, saying his team “has been working with AMD since day one” on the Copilot PC+ project.
“On-device AI really means faster response times, better privacy and costs for us,” Davuluri said. “But that means running models with billions of parameters on PC hardware. Compared to traditional PCs from just a few years ago, we’re talking 20 times the performance and up to 100 times the efficiency for AI workloads.”
In addition, AMD showed new gaming-oriented processors for laptops and desktops. “This is the fastest consumer CPU in the world,” Su said, holding up AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X chip. That 16-core processor works in a speed boost mode up to 5.7 GHz.
–With help from Jane Lanhee Lee.
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