AMD’s Lisa Su Goes Extra Time With Announcements During CES 2023 Keynote

At this year’s CES, AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su gave the pre-show keynote, and she came with an overabundance of announcements and guests. The theme of the keynote was high-performance and adaptive computing to help solve problems. On-stage guests included representatives from HP, Intuitive Surgical, Lenovo, Magic Leap, and Microsoft. It also included a former NASA astronaut for a bonus.

Dr. Su made seven key product announcements spanning energy efficient PCs to extreme processors designed for supercomputers. With all the announcements and guests, it’s no wonder the keynote ran significantly longer than planned. It seemed that every group in AMD got a piece of the keynote.

Despite the current slump in PC sales, most of AMD’s announcements focused on PCs - both desktop and notebooks. Of particular interest was AMD’s decision to add a dedicated AI core to its new Ryzen 7040 series notebook processors. The AMD Ryzen 7040 is designed to fit into ultrathin notebooks with 15W to 45W TDPs (thermal design power) and is made using TSMC’s advanced 4nm process. The Ryzen 7040 has AMD’s most advanced Zen 4 CPU cores matched with the latest RDNA3 GPU architecture.

The Ryzen 7040’s embedded AI technology was developed by Xilinx, which AMD acquired last year. But even prior to the acquisition, AMD had engaged with Xilinx to license the technology. Xilinx developed the AI engine for its Versal ACAP adaptive computing product. The details of the Ryzen AI engine, as AMD is now calling it, are still to be revealed, but Versal AI Engines are 2D arrays of VLIW vector-vector and matrix-matrix compute engines. While AI workloads can be run on AMD’s CPUs and integrated GPUs, AMD claims that running these workloads on a dedicated AI engine is more power efficient, which is why the company has introduced it’s first in a notebook processor. Microsoft’s EVP & Chief Product Officer Panos Panay gave a great endorsement for Ryzen AI and how Microsoft plans to use it initially for Teams and for other features in the future. We encourage AMD to make access to Ryzen AI through open tool chains and APIs in addition to Microsoft’s Studio tools.

It’s great to see AMD really embracing the pervasiveness of AI in computing. AMD has GPUs and FPGAs/ACAP for AI acceleration, and now is incorporating AI technology into mainstream notebook processors. Intel will also incorporate an integrated AI accelerator in its Meteor Lake processors later this year. $Advanced Micro Devices(AMD.US)$ $Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3x Shares ETF(SOXL.US)$ $PHLX Semiconductor Index(.SOX.US)$