The hardware sector, especially the PC industry, is currently at an inflection point due to the seismic impact brought forth by the AI (artificial intelligence) revolution.
This is according to top executives of chipmaker AMD during the company’s “Tech Day” media event held last July 10 to 11 in Los Angeles, California.
“Our industry is being reshaped by AI and AI PCs are changing the way we work, communicate, and play. It’s an incredible moment in history and AMD is leading this transition,” said David McAfee, corporate VP and general manager at AMD.
AMD, said McAfee, is responding to this computing trend by coming up with more powerful products such as the Strix Point APUs (accelerated processing units) powered by the new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture, RDNA 3.5 graphics, and XDNA 2 neural processing engines.
“Strix Point is really the only uncompromised AI PC solution in the market today,” said McAfee. “We also have our next-generation Granite Ridge desktop processors powered by Zen 5 microarchitecture, which are dropping ready for five motherboards in market aimed at gamers, developers, and content creators.”
Like McAfee, AMD senior vice president and general manager for computing and graphics business group Jack Huynh said during his presentation that the computing industry is currently at its “most interesting times”.
Huynh was just as effusive as his colleague, saying AI is as big as the industrial revolution. “It’s clear that AI is the new electricity. It’s going to be everywhere you are,” he said.
“This is not just a new chapter in the tech industry, but the very beginning of a journey to transform our lives, our careers, and our whole world forever. We’re on the most epic journey in the history of our company,” enthused Huynh, who has been with AMD since 1998.
“[This is] uncharted territory. When you’re first, there’s no map to follow but you’re setting the standard. And it takes tremendous courage because you will absolutely make mistakes along the way, but you can’t be afraid of those mistakes,” he shared.
Huynh said AMD has a long history of firsts in the tech industry, which included that in 2017 when the company “surprised the world” with the introduction of the Zen CPU.
“It was a [major] leap for the PC industry. We then followed this up with our chiplet technology that combined a 7-nanometer CPU with a 14-nanometer I/O Die. This created building blocks for advanced SOCs (system-on-a-chip) in the world that you see here today,” he narrated.
“Then just last year, we led the AI PC transition, bringing a dedicated NPU (neural processing unit) into the APU for the first time, ahead of the ecosystem at scale,” he added.
But, Huynh noted that the AI revolution that’s taken over the world and caught many by surprise has actually been years in the making inside of engineering walls of AMD.
“We thought deeply about this and debated it pretty heavily. We’ve been preparing this revolution for a very, very long time,” he said.
After much thought, the executive said AMD ultimately settled on the AI PC as the next logical next step.
“As we think about building the next generation PC, we did not want to build yet another PC, right? We want to build a whole new category of devices,” he said.
“We worked very hard the past several years on Zen 5 to build the absolute best CPU in the world. We then refreshed our GPU and mobilized it right to build very low-power GPU specifically for the mobile category. We then worked and re-architected our NPU to develop the world’s best NPU in overall performance and ultimately build the highest performance SOC in the world.”
