AMD is kicking off Computex in style. The chipmaker is introducing the Ryzen 9000 desktop processor based on the Zen5 architecture, setting a new standard for NPUs.

It’s been a while since AMD made its voice heard. AMD is seeing increasing market share compared to Intel, but at the same time Qualcomm is also getting more and more involved in the debates. It’s high time to speak up for AMD again, and the Computex computer trade fair in Taiwan was the ideal opportunity to do so.

AMD’s keynote did not go unnoticed. With the announcement of Zen5 and the Ryzen 9000 chips, AMD is ready to further intensify the battle with Intel in the desktop segment. The Ryzen AI 300 is intended to put Qualcomm back in its place in the emerging NPU market.

Ryzen 9000: The most powerful desktop processor yet?

The Ryzen 9000 processors are the official launch of Zen 5, AMD’s new chip architecture. Ryzen 9000 is the direct successor to the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series, which was introduced about two years ago. AMD promises, above all, gradual improvements in CPU performance: At the same clock speeds, Zen 5 is up to 16 percent faster than Zen 4, which in turn achieved a 29 percent performance jump over Zen 3.

Ryzen 9950X is the showpiece of the series and AMD has no hesitation in calling the processor the most powerful you can put in a desktop. The difference with the Ryzen 7950X is not the number of cores or clock speeds, but the number of operations the processor can process per cycle (IPC). The Ryzen 9950X is accompanied by three other processors.

Unlike the Ryzen 8000 desktop processors introduced earlier this year, AMD does not include an NPU in the Ryzen 9000 processors. An integrated GPU is present. The manufacturer juggles benchmarks to demonstrate the superiority of the Ryzen 9950X over the Intel Core i9-14900K and also claims to have doubled the PCle5 bandwidth.

AMD will only be able to prove these strong claims when the first PCs with a Ryzen 9000 processor appear. That will happen starting this summer.

Ryzen AI 300: even more TOPS

The Ryzen 9000 is aimed at the desktop market, but AMD wants to conquer the laptop market with the Ryzen AI 300. Qualcomm made Intel and AMD blush when Microsoft unveiled the Copilot Plus specification during Build. Only Copilot Plus PCs deserve the “AI PC” designation, according to Microsoft, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X is the reference processor.

In any case, AMD has a quick answer. The Ryzen AI 300 is a CPU for laptops, but the focus is on the NPU for accelerating AI workloads. AMD is showing two processors within the new series: The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 comes with 12 CPU and GPU cores, the Ryzen AI 9 365 has 10 CPU and 12 GPU cores.

However, the number of cores is not important: AMD stands out with the number of TOPS (trillion operations per second). The Ryzen AI 300 chips have 50 TOPS to offer. It is no coincidence that this is more than the limit of Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X (45 TOPS) and Intel Lunar Lake (40-45 TOPS), although Intel itself claims significantly more. We continue to emphasize that all these TOPS in your PC do not yet enable earth-shattering applications.

New name

Finally, AMD is also making adjustments to its naming scheme. How AMD numbers its chips is indecipherable even for experienced chip experts. Every number or letter in the name of the chip should tell you something about the properties of the chip. Two years ago, AMD revised the naming scheme, but that still did not provide enough clarity.

The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is the first chip to use the new scheme. The number 9 indicates that it is a top model (Ryzen 9) and the HX underlines this once again: AMD will use HX to higher performance indicate chips. The last three digits indicate the processor number: 3 stands for the generation and 70 for the SKU.