The AI PC concept has been gaining momentum among chip vendors, at least as a marketing term, for several months and AMD CEO Lisa Su again focused on it during the company’s third quarter conference call on Tuesday.
“AI PCs…will fundamentally redefine the computing experience over the coming years,” she said. Later, she told an analyst, “What I’m most excited about in PCs is actually the AI PC. I think the AI PC opportunity is an opportunity to redefine what PCs are in terms of a productivity tool…We’re at the beginning of a wave there. We’re investing heavily in Ryzen AI and the opportunity to really broaden AI capabilities of PCs going forward.”
Su also dodged the analyst’s question about whether AMD is interested in making ARM-based CPUs, instead of X86 CPUs, saying that ARM is “a partner in many respects so we use ARM through part of the portfolio” but quickly added, “X86 is still the majority of the volume in PCs,” and called the combination of X86 and Windows a “very robust ecosystem.”
The question of moving to ARM is somewhat fundamental to the AI PC concept, however, especially after Apple announced on Oct. 30 Mac computers with M3 silicon on ARM architecture, switching from Intel Core in M2. In addition, Qualcomm now has the Snapdragon X Elite SoC on the company’s ARM CPU core, Oryon. Also, Nvidia has started designing CPU chips that run Windows and use ARM technology, according to a recent Reuters report.
Not to be left out, Intel, which developed the X86 architecture in the late 1970s, is making waves with its concept for the AI PC, and has plans to extend the AI PC to all manner of IoT edge products with a rugged version of the Meteor Lake chip in 2024. At Intel Innovation in September, CEO Pat Gelsinger announced Meteor Lake will first appear with the chip product name Intel Core Ultra for PCs, which ships Dec. 14 and will appear in the Acer Swift laptop.
RELATED: Intel to expand AI Meteor Lake chip to edge, beyond the AI PC
Intel described at Innovation what an AI PC is good for, introducing several companies that have developed software to take advantage of accelerated processing for inference work on desktops and laptops. Technically speaking, AI in the form of machine learning is already running on small devices outside of the data center, including sensors like the SmartBug from TDK. Google’s Pixel smartphone also uses AI for editing out objects from photographs captured with the phone. A goal of many IoT edge products is to perform some AI functions to prevent the need to sort through data at a distant cloud data center. For example, a surveillance camera might use AI to eliminate still frames, only focusing on video frames where an object or person enters the frame.
On the Tuesday AMD earnings call, Su told analysts that AMD is investing “heavily in Ryzen AI and the opportunity to really broaden AI capabilities of PCs going forward,” adding, “It’s going to be less about what instruction set you’re using and more about what experience you are delivering to customers.”
Asked to clarify whether Su’s comment would close the door to an ARM-based PC processor, AMD spokesman Drew Prairie said her comment “doesn’t close the door for an ARM PC, but it’s not a first order thing for us.”
In June, AMD announced the Phoenix processor for thin and light laptops, which now have been deployed in 50 laptops from various vendors, Prairie added. “All have a dedicated AI engine in silicon on chip,” he said. “It’s a multiyear roadmap” to make laptops “more performant.” The evolution of AI on laptops is designed to coincide with Microsoft bringing more functions into the PC OS.
Those Phoenix chips include a dedicated AI engine on an X86 processor dubbed Ryzen AI.
AMD’s intention, Prairie added, is to roll AI engines across AI ports from the data center to the edge and client products. “It’s foundational,” he said, although he added that AI will not run in every product where the silicon space doesn’t warrant it.
AMD plans to discuss more of its AI PC concept on Dec. 6 at its Advancing AI Event to be streamed live on the AMD website.