What’s driving enterprise adoption of AI PC’s? Six Five Media hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead are at AMD Advancing AI, and joined by AMD’s Jack Huynh, Senior Vice President and GM of Computing and Graphics Group, and Rahul Tikoo, Senior Vice President & GM, Client Business Unit, for a conversation on AMD’s leadership in end-to-end AI infrastructure and the exciting announcement of the next-gen processors for the enterprise, the Ryzen AI PRO 300 series.
Their discussion covers:
- Jack’s insights on how AI PCs are set to transform the enterprise landscape
- The journey AMD has taken to develop their third-generation AI processor, the Ryzen 300 series
- Rahul’s perspective on what sets the Ryzen AI Pro 300 series apart as the best AI PC platform for the enterprise
- How AMD collaborates with Microsoft and ISVs to accelerate transformational AI experiences
- Adoption trends among enterprise partners for AMD’s Ryzen AI Pro technology
Learn more at AMD and AMD Advancing AI.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here in San Francisco at AMD’s second annual Advancing AI event. AI is the favorite topic of The Six Five. And whether it’s infrastructure, CPU, GPU, networking, enterprise, SaaS, AI PCs, we love AI.
Daniel Newman: That’s a mouthful. Trying to get through all that, but yeah, we really did. We hit the data center side, we hit the networking side, we hit the devices side Pat. It was an action packed, full day. Lots going on. Demos. Really well attended too, and I’m seeing quite a bit of press already get out there. I think a lot of them had your quotes in them.
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t think so. I did a broadcast interview, but I’m really here for this. This is so much fun. One of the biggest drivers of AI excitement has been the AI PC and obviously AMD has been a major factor in the PC market. Heck, going back to when I was a product manager for a PC manufacturer, AMD, they just keep driving up, increasing the score all the time. I want to break down some of today’s announcements with two of my favorite AMD client guys. Jack, Rahul, great to see you. Rahul, welcome back. First time for AMD, but we may have recorded you at a different company.
Rahul Tikoo: Yeah, yeah. No, my trip back to AMD after 12 years at a different company, it feels like home. Thank you for having me.
Patrick Moorhead: Absolutely, Jack, great to see you.
Jack Hunyh: Great to see you, Pat. Thanks for having us.
Patrick Moorhead: It’s been great spending time.
Jack Hunyh: Of course Dan, good to see you.
Daniel Newman: I can’t reach you.
Patrick Moorhead: There we go.
Daniel Newman: That’s all right, we’ll shake hands afterwards.
Jack Hunyh: Yes.
Daniel Newman: Well first let’s start with you, Jack.
Jack Hunyh: Sure.
Daniel Newman: Both of you, congratulations.
Jack Hunyh: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: Very positive day.
Rahul Tikoo: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: I believe that, Pat, we have the best analysis out there, but I’ve been reading a lot of what’s being said, and there seems to be a lot of positivity right now. Some of the benchmarks looked great, some of the benchmarks we did on Signal 65, that’s pretty fun. But let’s talk about the AI PC side. You announced your new Ryzen Pro. I think it’s the AI PRO 300. I want to get that right.
Jack Hunyh: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: Talk a little bit about how you see this AI PC transformation. How do you see AMD continue to grow in this space?
Jack Hunyh: No, it’s going to be… it’s incredible what’s happening out there. Look, we believe AI is probably the biggest innovation past 50 years. It’s as big as the Industrial Revolution. It’s going to be the new electricity, it’s going to be everywhere.
Daniel Newman: As long as there’s enough electricity.
Jack Hunyh: That’s right. So when we talk to business enterprise around the world, just so excited with what it could bring. Because one of our goals, increased productivity. Time is our greatest asset. So then how do we protect that time for every individual? And one of our goals is to really accelerate, minimize really repetitive task, mundane task, to allow the worker to focus on the highest value add to the business. We unlock the full imagination, and that’s one of our goals. And as we created the first Copilot+ PC designed for enterprise – Rahul and I talked about this even with the team prior was – we want first create a great PC. A better PC, maybe the perfect PC; and then we want a better AI. And we did much better than that, we created leadership AI, the best AI engine to marketplace with 50-plus TOPS. And then finally, we want to create the best value. How do we create the best TCO? And we did all of that with the Ryzen AI 300 and we’re super excited with what it could bring.
It’s actually just the very beginning. AI is going to change everything that we do in terms of how we work, we play, how we create, and we’re working so closely with our partners right now and the whole ecosystem, to first get the platform and the form factors, and beautiful form factors, now is the experiences. And you’re just seeing the very beginning. And you saw a little bit of Copilot+ today from Pavan, that’s Office 365, you saw live translation, you saw semantic search with total recall, with the security now. And we’re so excited at what we can bring to the whole world.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I want to ask a follow-up to that. So AMD doesn’t get a lot of credit for being the first with an AI PC, but the facts are, you brought out the first AI PC. Can you talk a little bit about the journey of the AI 300?
Jack Hunyh: Sure.
Patrick Moorhead: You were the first… So there was a reason you jumped into it, a driver on that, and then now in your third generation here, talk a little bit about the journey.
Jack Hunyh: Sure. We thought about AI for many, many years at AMD. Deeply. And we saw the vision what AI could bring. And we invested, as you know Pat, when you invest in a roadmap, it’s a three or five year investment and journey. And we also think about the next 10 years, what does it look like? And we placed a bet that AI could change the world. And we launched the first Ryzen AI processor with the first integrated NPU, as you remember, over a year ago with 10 TOPS. But we didn’t stop. We then introduced 16 TOPS less than a year later. And then now with Strix and that Strix Pro, we now have 50-plus TOPS.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, Pavan seemed pretty excited about the 50 TOPS.
Jack Hunyh: Super excited.
Patrick Moorhead: I think he said something about a magical experience. I was like, “Whoa Pavan.” I’ve talked to Pavan a lot, and he doesn’t lean into it like that often.
Jack Hunyh: He’s very excited.
Patrick Moorhead: It was good to hear.
Jack Hunyh: As you know Pat , Copilot+ has 40 TOPS minimum at AMD.
Patrick Moorhead: I’m sorry.
Jack Hunyh: We don’t do the bare minimum. We got to do absolute leadership. And he told me, “Jack, we will use every single TOP you can provide.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s exciting.
Jack Hunyh: And it’s so exciting to work with Microsoft because one of our goals with Microsoft is not just do silicon. The OS, the application, all at the very beginning. And that’s how you unlock the full potential of the experience to our end users. And we’re so happy to work with Microsoft. We have a very closed-loop system with them. Pavan and I talk multiple times a week. We text quite a bit. As Pat said, we have a texting relationship, that’s when you know you’re very close.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, come on, you’re not supposed to let that spill out here.
Jack Hunyh: No, but we love Microsoft. They want to push the envelope. They want to make the world a better place. And we see AI, not just in small business enlargement, but in healthcare, in financial services, in gaming, it’s going to proliferate everywhere. And what I love about it is I’m using Copilot+ myself right now, for meeting summarization, of course we do the Teams super resolution, and I’m using search as well. And I see it. It’s saving myself time. Because if you can save yourself two, three hours a day; 10, 15 hours a week, that’s huge.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, sign me up.
Jack Hunyh: That’s huge.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, you compound that across your lifetime and then you obviously can look at that as an exponential impact to a business, business with thousands of employees each getting one hour, two hour, three hours. Of course, CEOs have to be just absolutely clamoring over that opportunity.
Rahul Tikoo: In another life, recently, I ran a software organization. And we implemented AI Copilot in the software development processes. And just at that scale, 18% to 20% savings in productivity, that’s huge when you think about tens of thousands of software developers in an organization. If you can create that 18%, 20% productivity uplift, that’s big for organizations. That’s what AI PCs can do.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s huge. Yeah.
Daniel Newman: So let me ask you Rahul, some of the comments have been about the Ryzen AI Pro 300 and the series as a whole being the best platform for enterprise. Of course it’s competitive out there, there’s a few other companies that are playing in this space. 50 TOPS is great. I think some people would say it’s an amazing accomplishment, other people would say I don’t know if I could visually feel the difference between 45 and 50, and different numbers get thrown around. So when you start talking about platforms, you’re talking about enterprise, you’re talking about value. Talk about what makes AMD’s platform better for enterprise.
Rahul Tikoo: Yeah no, I think that’s a great question and I think it’s a follow on to what Jack was talking about too. We first decided to make the best platform for enterprises, and then put the best AI in there. And so when you think about that, what does that mean really? First, if you think about the Zen 5 cores, Strix Pro that we just launched today has 12 Zen 5 cores, about 40% better multi-threaded performance. So if you look at a basic office use case, all of us are doing Teams collaboration, we’re on email, we have a browser running in the background. And in an enterprise you got background tasks like manageability tasks or security agents running, all of that uses that processing power. So when you have 40% better processing power than anyone else out there, that’s pretty awesome. And if you were paying attention to what Pavan was talking about, he showed this slide where he showed that the Ryzen Pro that we launched today is about 40% better than the Apple product out there too. So from a performance standpoint, check.
Then when you think about the TOPS, 50 TOPS, that’s 25% more TOPS than what Microsoft’s water level is for entering into the Copilot+ PC experiences. And so being able to provide that for things like recall that can use every bit of the TOPS that we provide and be more responsive, that’s amazing. It’s 5X more TOPS than the next enterprise processor that’s available out there today. Right? So when you think about our TOPS, that’s why 5x more TOPS than the other enterprise processors available today. And then we didn’t just stop there, we touched every part of it. Graphics engine; 16 compute units, increasing graphics 33% generationally on these products. And then give all of that performance, but in a very efficient design where this processor… And this is measured data by the way, this is on one of the products that you were talking about is HP announced they’d built the EliteBook X G1a.
And on that product we measured 23 hours of video playback, nine plus hours of Teams, 19 to 20 hours of MobileMark battery life. So again, multi-day battery life with the kind of performance uplifts that you see. And then what makes this enterprise is really the foundational elements of what an enterprise cares about. Highly secure products. So security, manageability, reliability, those are some of the foundational elements on our PRO technologies that we offer our customers. So hopefully that answered what you’re looking for, but that’s how we think about it.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. In fact, Dan and I, and The Six Five were at the HP event. Talked to Alex Cho, and we covered this in our weekly pod, we were really struck at how much they leaned into that design that had your processor in it. Got demos with specific ISVs, and my question for one of them, and it was a video platform, I said, “Hey, what platforms do you support?” And they said, “The only platform we support is AMD.” I was like, “Oh interesting. Okay.” But anyways, Jack, we talked a little bit about what motivated the entry into AI PCs. We talked a little bit about the work that you’ve been doing with Microsoft, what Pavan said on stage, whether I’m super stoked about semantic search for files and photos because every user uses that every day, at least in a file explorer.
Jack Hunyh: Completely agree.
Patrick Moorhead: And it’s going to change the way… And then recall is the icing on the cake here. Let’s talk a little bit about the future. How are you addressing ISVs in the future and in terms of investment in those ISVs and that work? What are your thoughts on that?
Jack Hunyh: Yeah, definitely. So of course Microsoft is one of the most strategic ecosystem partners, but ecosystem is very broad. So we’re engaging with the top ISVs in the world. We’re on track to have about 150 ISVs developed by Ryzen AI by a year. These are Adobes, Zoom, Autodesk, and they see the potential. And it’s things like Zoom, better video. And denoising well beyond super resolution. And when we work with them, one of their goals is, “Okay, how do we get the absolute best performance but also maximize efficiency, especially in a mobile phone factor?” And that’s where the strength of the NPU because it could have the best perf per watt. And that’s why we’re investing so heavily in AI PC, because we see a world where everyone wants to have the best possible experience without compromising portability, mobility. And one of the things we want to do is not just do things a little bit faster, you also want to create net-new experiences. So one of our goals is to do things that hasn’t been done before. And that’s one of our goals with our ISVs right now.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. In the end, it’s always about the experience. Listen, I love the tech, I love the specs, but it’s all about what can I do differently on this platform that I can’t do?
Jack Hunyh: That’s right.
Patrick Moorhead: And how easy it is to even find those features.
Jack Hunyh: That’s right, that’s right.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, we’re at the very beginning, but I’m optimistic because it solves so many problems. And quite frankly, it also helps solve an offload problem from the cloud.
Jack Hunyh: Definitely. Definitely.
Patrick Moorhead: Which is if you’re doing a lot of the inference here, it doesn’t have to be done in the cloud, and that saves cloud providers money as well.
Jack Hunyh: That’s right. That’s right, that’s right.
Rahul Tikoo: Pavan talked about it too today in his session.
Patrick Moorhead: I heard the hybrid. I heard that.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. I mean them acknowledging it is a great indicator of where it’s going, because their benefit is across the-
Rahul Tikoo: Yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: Exactly.
Daniel Newman: They don’t really care. If you want to do a whole bunch of stuff in the cloud, they’re like, “Great.” But it is about, to the point of the experience, removing latency, making things instantly available without connectivity at times. Although that keeps getting better. But you know what, I think that’s segued really nicely to maybe the last question, Rahul, is just is the practical application in the market. We sort of have these two schools, all of us techies. We’re super hyped about this, so exciting, AI PC has changed the world. I heard a guy joking on all the bubble bears, everyone that says AI is over-hyped. They’re the ones that say, “Oh yeah, it’s all in there.” And you’ve got all this hardware now, but no one’s using it. You’re working with the enterprises as you’re talking to the enterprises. Talk about how the adoption of this technology is going and how you’re seeing it.
Rahul Tikoo: Yeah, No. I think if you take a step back, as we exited last year, 90% of the AI PCs that were sold were with our technology to the point of we were one of the first.
Patrick Moorhead: Can we say that one more time?
Rahul Tikoo: 90% of the PCs that were sold with NPUs last year were on our technology. So when you think about that, we already had great momentum given we were first in market and then as we launched products this year, we’ve continued to have momentum. So as I think about the two products that we talked about, HP announced their EliteBook X G1a, Lenovo announced at IFA, the ThinkPad 14S, both enterprise products using our Strix Pro 300 processors. That’s going to just scale up from here. Lisa showed it on stage, a hundred plus products that are going to show up across the portfolio. If you even take a step back and look broader than the enterprise, there are 200-plus products with AI technologies from us in the PC space that will be available from all of our OEM partners.
Think about all the brand names, Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Dell, MSI and the list keeps going. And why that’s important is because if you know this ecosystem, the Windows ecosystem, thrives on availability of different form factors, different screen sizes, desktops, notebooks, and being able to reach all of our customers with however they want to use the PC. And so if you look at some of the IDC data, IDC is predicting in a couple of years, majority of the PCs that are out there will be AI PCs that will have some sort of a neural processing unit. And that’s the journey we’re on. The investments we’re making in our AI PC portfolio, that’s the journey we’re on. We’re completely bought in and so our OEMs.
Jack Hunyh: Correct. And we’re aggressively using AI within AMD. For example, on engineering side, physical design, to get the best layout, reduce white space. We’re aggressively using AI in our software development to get much greater efficiency. Obviously on the marketing side, right? On the financial side, summarization. So we’re doing all that. And it’s funny, Pat, I’ll tell you a quick story. When we talk about semantic search, Pavan talked about… Today, when you try to find a file in Windows, it’s very difficult.
Patrick Moorhead: Sure.
Jack Hunyh: File name, file size.
Patrick Moorhead: Yes.
Jack Hunyh: It’s very difficult.
Patrick Moorhead: It’s one of the hardest things to do, 35 years later.
Jack Hunyh: It’s very difficult. But that’s not the human mind works. The human memory’s work is, “Hey, I went to San Diego with my son Louis last year, went to a great, what was the name of that restaurant? So we want to make AI to be as intuitive, as natural as possible. So you don’t have to overthink, right? That’s how you proliferate AI, to get the experience to how a human naturally interacts. And that was the birth of semantic search and now it’s being incorporated into Copilot+. And you can see more of that where we want to make that experience to the end user as personal and customizable to every individual in the world. And that’s our vision.
Daniel Newman: Jack and Rahul, I want to thank you both. I think we could spend a bunch more time talking about this, just thinking about how much I appreciate semantic search. And the idea that in the future, the single abstraction, whether I want sales data reports or I want to just know the best restaurant. I just want to ask-
Jack Hunyh: That’s right.
Daniel Newman: … one OS level bot that’s going to take care of all this for me. But we’ll come back. That’ll be next year at Advancing AI.
Jack Hunyh: Definitely.
Rahul Tikoo: I’m excited about the personal assistance. That’s what I need.
Daniel Newman: For us, isn’t it all the same? When do we not work? When are we not working? So I don’t know. But Jack, Rahul, let’s do this again sometime soon.
Jack Hunyh: Definitely, definitely. Pat, thank you so much.
Rahul Tikoo: Thank you guys, thank you.
Daniel Newman: Thanks. I’m going to take this out of here.
Rahul Tikoo: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: And we’ll save you. We’ll come across in just a second.
Rahul Tikoo: Of course. Of course.
Daniel Newman: I want to thank all you for tuning in. We are here. The Six Five is On The Road in San Francisco at AMD’s second annual Advancing AI event. Thanks so much for tuning in. Check out all the content, subscribe, be part of our Six Five community. We’ll see you all later. Bye-bye now.
