AMD claims its top-end Ryzen AI chip is faster than Apple’s M3 Pro

2024 will go down in tech history as the year Microsoft finally makes its Windows laptops into serious competitors to the MacBook. So far, that’s been thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips, which switched to a homogenous chip architecture and boosted clock speeds to keep up with Apple’s faster, more power-efficient processors. But now AMD says it has chips that can take on the MacBook, and it will continue to push its processors into the mix.

Last week, AMD held a two-day event in Los Angeles where it revealed detailed information about its new Strix Point Ryzen AI chips, which are built on its latest Zen 5 architecture. Zen 5 is a big leap from AMD’s previous-generation chip architecture, and is said to deliver more instructions per clock cycle while consuming just 15W of power, resulting in improved frame rates in games.

At the event, AMD bragged about beating the MacBook in a way I’ve never heard of a company directly targeting a competitor before: AMD claimed that its new Ryzen chips “exceed the performance of the MacBook Air in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering and gaming,” are “15% faster than the M3 Pro in Cinebench,” and can drive up to four displays “unlike the MacBook Air, which is limited to two displays.”

But AMD not only told reporters that its upcoming Ryzen AI chips are faster than Apple’s M3 and M3 Pro, but also said its new integrated graphics outperformed Qualcomm’s current generation and Intel’s previous generation, and stressed that it can run “AAA games in full HD,” including titles that “some of our competitors can’t run.” AMD also claimed that its NPU can perform 50 trillion floating-point operations per second, which is faster than any of the competitors in the Microsoft Copilot Plus laptop being offered this year.

But whether they are faster or not is something AMD has yet to actually prove.

Games that AMD says will run faster on the new iGPU weren’t available to try at the event. Most of AMD’s AI demos didn’t actually run on AMD’s NPU, and the ones that did were unresponsive. Asus’ automated file consolidation and organization program, which was the most interesting of AMD’s AI demos, wasn’t available to try at all. And AMD’s most powerful gaming laptop on show was running games on Nvidia graphics with Nvidia upscaling, rather than its own integrated graphics.

AMD spokespeople gave a variety of answers as to why such a feature isn’t there: the demo laptop isn’t representative of the final product, Asus may be working on final BIOS tweaks, the hotel’s Wi-Fi was too slow to install other games, and it’s unclear why some AI-powered apps don’t run on the NPU.

While I didn’t get to see these Ryzen AI chips in action, here’s what I was able to find out at the event.

Ryzen AI appears to be significantly faster than AMD’s previous generation of laptop chips: AMD says its new Zen 5 CPU architecture delivers an average of 16% more instructions per clock cycle (IPC), performing tasks much faster without increasing the chip’s clock speed.

And that CPU core only provides a 10 percent IPC boost in our sample game (Far Cry 6), AMD says that with its new RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture, these chips will deliver 19 to 32 percent more graphics performance per watt at 15 watts, the wattage that the thinnest laptops and portable gaming systems typically default to. Compared to the previous generation, the integrated graphics should theoretically be able to produce more frames per second or consume less power.

While AMD’s chips are theoretically more efficient than before, the company didn’t say whether these machines would have even better battery life. During the event, AMD would only say that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “8+ hours.” I wasn’t able to speak with an Asus rep at the event to get actual numbers for the laptops demoed, but AMD seemed hesitant to say anything beyond “check with an Asus rep.”

Thin and light productivity laptops have been delivering over 8 hours of battery life for a while now, so it’s reasonable to assume that these Ryzen AI laptops could probably do the same, based on the numerous improvements AMD has made to their architecture. But laptop makers generally over-promise on battery life and then under-deliver. An Asus rep on this Best Buy page said that the Ryzen AI Zenbook S16 has about 12 hours of battery life, while the Qualcomm Vivobook S15 has 18 hours. That means Asus’ flagship AMD laptop is 6 hours shorter than the Qualcomm flagship. 12 hours is about 6 hours shorter than the MacBook Air M3 I tested.

“We wanted to create a notebook that’s faster than the MacBook Pro and thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air,” AMD senior vice president and general manager of computing and graphics Jack Huynh said onstage as he introduced the ASUS Zenbook S16. But when I got my hands on the Zenbook S16 in the demo area, feel It was supposed to be lighter and thinner, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

According to both companies’ spec sheets, the 16″ Zenbook is the same weight and thickness as the 15″ Air, at 3.3 pounds (1.5kg or 1.51kg) and 0.43 or 0.45 inches (1.1 or 1.15cm) thick. (It’s 0.52 inches wider and 0.32 inches longer.) That’s not to say it wasn’t incredibly thin and light; it was. But to be truly impressed, you’ll need to see the Ryzen AI beat the competition with your own eyes.

During one of its two-hour general presentations, AMD boasted that its 50 TOPS NPU was more than five times faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake (not to mention that Intel’s Lunar Lake NPU, due out this fall, will offer up to 48 TOPS). But because no available demos were running on the NPU, it wasn’t clear how much faster AMD’s NPU actually is compared to competitor chips that we’ve previously tested.

On the Zenbook S16 and the 13-inch ProArt, we demoed two AI programs that generate images from inputted prompts, but neither program used AMD’s NPU to run the application; Windows Task Manager showed that the CPU or integrated graphics were doing most or all of the image generation.

There was also an MSI Prestige laptop demoing webcam effects like background blur and auto emoji. The process utilized 51 percent of the NPU, but the AMD’s CPU was still loaded at 78 percent, and it also used nearly half of the laptop’s 32GB of memory. It also couldn’t reliably generate an emoji on the screen based on my facial expressions, and it took several seconds, if at all.

One of the most interesting AI apps mentioned by AMD is ASUS’s Story Cube, an AI-powered app that will ship with its upcoming ProArt series laptops. The company says that using local, on-device AI processing, the app can automatically capture, label, and sort photos and videos according to the people and objects in the photos and where they were taken.

It was available for testing in the demo area, but when I asked an AMD representative to show me how it worked, he said he couldn’t — instead, he showed me the program in an idle state, as if it had already finished sorting my photos.

AMD claimed that the Radeon 890M iGPU could produce 52fps in the general session. Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2at 72 fps Forza Horizon 5With AMD Fluid Motion Frames turned on, AMD said it can achieve 93fps. Cyberpunk 2077at 90 fps Red Dead Redemption 2at 148 fps Forza Horizon 5.

The company didn’t specify the graphics settings and display resolutions on stage (or even on some of the slides), leading up to a comparison between the Radeon 890M plus AFMF and Nvidia’s mobile RTX 2050 (Full HD (1080p), medium graphics). I asked an AMD rep in the demo area if the same settings were used with AFMF turned off, and he confirmed that was the case.

AMD also claims that the new iGPU is 1.65x faster in games than the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100. Cyberpunk 2077 1.36 times faster Shadow of the Tomb RaiderThe company didn’t say what in-game setting it used here, and it wasn’t mentioned on the slide or in a footnote at the end of the slide deck.

We weren’t able to demo any of these games on the Radeon 890M, so we couldn’t verify AMD’s claims. Fallout 4 and Pie’s LieHowever, I couldn’t confirm that either game was running at 1080p as AMD said it would, nor could I check the graphics presets, which weren’t listed where they usually are in the settings menu. Pie’s Lie With Steam’s in-game fps counter enabled, the frame rate was locked at 60fps. Fallout 4 It was running between 75fps and 95fps depending on what I was doing in-game.

I asked an AMD representative if this was possible, and he replied: Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb RaiderI tried to play these or any of the other games the company boasts about on the Radeon 890M, but was told it would be best to wait for a review unit as the performance wasn’t indicative of the final retail version, and that the hotel’s Wi-Fi was too slow and downloads would take too long.

The first laptops with AMD’s Strix Point chips, the Asus Zenbook S 16, ProArt P16 and ProArt PX13, will be available on July 28. and With Snapdragon laptops already taking up shelf space, this is a key moment for AMD to prove that its x86 Zen 5 architecture can deliver speeds that are on par with or even better than competitor’s Arm architecture.

If AMD is successful, it will put even more pressure on Intel ahead of the release of Lunar Lake, especially as Intel wants to prove that its new x86 chips can beat Arm. If AMD doesn’t succeed, it will put pressure on Intel again to show that older generations of PC chips are still catching up.