I visited AMD's office here in Taipei, Taiwan, during Computex 2023 to have a conversation with David McAfee, the company's Corporate VP and General Manager of the Client Channel Business. I also had a chance to see AMD's Ryzen XDNA AI engine at work in a laptop demo, and McAfee discussed the steps AMD is taking to prepare the operating system and software ecosystem for the burgeoning AI use cases that will run locally on the PC, which we'll dive into further below.
After following the AMD codename-inspired hallway map you see above, I found my way to the demo room to see AMD's latest tech in action.
AMD's demo laptop was an Asus Strix Scar 17 that comes powered by AMD's 4nm 'Phoenix' Ryzen 9 7940HS processor paired with Radeon 780M graphics. These 35-45W chips come with the Zen 4 architecture and RDNA 3 graphics. AMD also had an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 running the same demo.
The XDNA AI engine is a dedicated accelerator that resides on-die with the CPU cores. The goal for the XDNA AI engine is to execute lower-intensity AI inference workloads, like audio, photo, and video processing, at lower power than you could achieve on a CPU or GPU while delivering faster response times than online services, thus boosting performance and saving battery power.
