AMD is one of the world’s biggest computer chip companies, best known for its fierce competition with Intel. It’s a rivalry that really kicked off in the early 2000s when AMD’s Athlon and Opteron processors saw great success. While AMD has often struggled to keep up with Intel, its latest Ryzen CPUs are some of the most competitive chips it has produced in years. AMD also acquired ATI in 2006, a 3D graphics card company. It now produces a variety of Radeon GPUs that compete with Nvidia’s GeForce line of graphics cards. AMD also produces the chips found in the latest PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and the Valve Steam Deck, and it re-entered the server market with its Epyc brand in 2017.
Five to 20 percent, to be a little inexact. That’s according to AMD CEO Lisa Su, who told Bloomberg that components from TSMC’s Arizona facilities will cost more than similar parts made in Taiwan, but says it’s worth it for diversifying supply chains.
AMD is expecting its first Arizona-made chips by the end of the year.
[bloomberg.com]
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Verge Score
Phenomenal battery life, plenty of ports, an okay screen, and the worst laptop speakers I’ve heard in my life.
Including Ghost of Tsushima, F1 25, and The Finals. Check out the full list on AMD’s website.
AMD SVP and GM of computing and graphics Jack Huynh shared that the company will hold a press conference livestream at the trade show in Taipei, Taiwan on Wednesday, May 21st at 11AM local time (Tuesday, May 20th, 11PM EST). Huynh says AMD will “unveil groundbreaking AI advancements” that redefine gaming, PCs, and professional workloads.
Ayaneo’s Retro Mini PC AM01 debuted in 2023 with a giant black rectangle where the ‘80s-era Macintosh’s screen was located. The company is updating that mini PC’s design and specs its the new AM01S featuring a four-inch articulated screen, as spotted by Time Extension.
Pricing and availability isn’t known yet, but the AMo1S will be powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor.
AMD delivers the ultimate blow to Intel, thanks to its second-gen 3D V-Cache technology.
I guess people are pretty interested in Framework’s new Strix Halo desktop, Strix Point 13-inch (it’s translucent!) and 12-inch convertible laptop, because I’ve never been put on hold to visit a dang website before.
My colleagues who are veterans of the PS5 restock wars tell me this is normal. Y’all are really out here waiting in line online?
That’s just over two weeks from today — it’ll have a YouTube livestream at 8AM ET (that’s 5AM for me on the West Coast!) to show off its half-announced RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT and hopefully reveal their all-important pricing.
The company has set expectations that these will not compete with Nvidia’s latest and greatest on performance, but here’s hoping they won’t cost so dang much. They’ll ship in early March.
AMD announced the new RDNA 4 cards at CES without a release date beyond “Q1,” and AMD exec David McAfee later narrowed that window to “March.” Now, we just heard AMD CEO Lisa Su narrow it further to “early March” on the company’s Q4 earnings call. The company’s reportedly planning an RDNA 4 event at the end of this month.
Don’t expect them to compete with Nvidia’s greatest on performance — but perhaps on price? That would be very nice.
Its Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings boast record revenue for both data center and client divisions — where “client” equals its Ryzen chips with their Intel-beating gaming CPUs and impressive integrated graphics. While AMD’s gaming biz has been cut in half year-over-year as game console sales dip, AMD says it’s cumulatively shipped 100 million units into current-gen consoles.
With PS5 cumulative shipments ending the year at 65 million, does that mean around 35 million Xbox systems, or are handhelds counted too?
The chip maker announced the series earlier this month, and today, AMD’s David McAfee said they’ll be released sometime in March release date. They’ll be far behind Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs.
HP calls its ZBook Ultra 14 G1a “the world’s most powerful 14-inch mobile workstation,” because it comes with AMD’s most powerful mobile chip: the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395, aka “Strix Halo,” with up to 128GB of unified memory shared among the CPU, GPU, and AI engines.
I watched it generate an AI image of Las Vegas on a locally loaded large language model.
The AI boom means most of these highly sought-after parts wind up in server farms, so it’s rare to see one ourselves — but AMD and Nvidia showed off a few at CES 2025. Here’s AMD’s MI325X, and then what appears to be Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72, with potentially lots of its new Blackwell AI chips inside.
Asus is introducing an AMD version of its Apex motherboards at CES this week, which had previously been exclusive to Intel since 2017. The ROG Crosshair X870E Apex and Ryzen 9 9950X are already setting overclocking records, and that’s before the 9950X3D launches soon. Meanwhile, Intel is busy rolling out performance fixes for its latest Arrow Lake CPUs to try and improve gaming performance.
You can watch it on YouTube, and I’ve embedded the livestream below. We’ll be watching, too!
8
Verge Score
The AMD Strix Point CPU in the Zephyrus G16 gives this gaming laptop a battery life boost over the Intel version.
AMD could be about to announce its next-generation GPUs at CES 2025 in January, and now AMD’s own ROCm library is referencing two unannounced GPUs. The RX 8800 and RX 8600 have both appeared in the ROCm code, just as AMD’s graphics boss Jack Huynh has confirmed he’s holding a CES keynote. Nvidia is also rumored to be launching its RTX 5000 series GPUs at CES.
Lisa Su confirmed she’d launch the first RDNA 4 GPUs in “early 2025,” and now AMD graphics boss Jack Huynh will officially host a livestreamed press conference on January 6th at 11AM PT / 2PM ET. It will “discuss how AMD is expanding its leadership across PCs and gaming.”
The rumor mill is expecting the unannounced AMD RX 8800 XT:
The company is laying off 4 percent of its staff, which translates to about 1,000 employees, reports CNBC. AMD has been transitioning into an AI chip company as it works to compete with Nvidia, which is now the most valuable company in the world thanks in large part to its AI chips.
AMD’s 7800X3D successor is also better at non-gaming workloads this time around.
Did you know SpaceX’s “latest generation broadband satellites” use AMD chips? The chipmaker just bragged about that in Q3 2024 earnings, and it’s news to me.
AMD’s product page says: “AMD Versal Adaptive SoCs combine application processors, real-time processors, and vector processors with traditional FPGA resources such as programmable logic fabric, DSP resources, and embedded memory.”
