You have to feel sorry for Intel at this point. Not only has Apple left its CPUs in the dust, but AMD’s new Ryzan AI Max chips claim to do the same to Intel’s flagship Core Ultra 9 288V.
The new chips take the same approach as Apple Silicon in combining CPU, GPU, and unified memory. AMD doesn’t credit Apple with the idea, but does admit the chip wouldn’t exist without the Cupertino company …
Engadget reports that the new chips are available with up to 16 CPU cores, 50 graphics cores, and 128GB unified memory. The result, claims AMD, is that it will render 3D graphics more than two-and-a-half times faster than the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V.
AMD denies following in Apple’s footsteps.
You might think AMD was taking a bit of inspiration from Apple Silicon, with its powerful CPU cores, graphics and unified memory. But according to VP Joe Macri, AMD was building towards this long before Apple. “We were building APUs [chips combining CPUs and Radeon graphics] while Apple was using discrete GPUs. They were using our discrete GPUs. So I don’t credit Apple with coming up with the idea.”
However, Macri does admit that this latest chip might never have been developed in the first place without Apple’s influence.
Macri gives Apple credit for proving that you don’t need discrete graphics to sell people on powerful computers. “Many people in the PC industry said, well, if you want graphics, it’s gotta be discrete graphics because otherwise people will think it’s bad graphics,” he said.
Apple proved that buyers don’t care about integrated versus discrete, they only care about the performance. That enabled him to win the corporate politics battle needed to get the go-ahead for the development of the Ryzan AI Max.
With the success of Apple Silicon, Macri was finally able to get approval to spend a “mind boggling” amount of money developing the Ryzen AI Max. “I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I’d been pushing for this big APU forever, that I could build a system that was smaller, faster, and I could give much higher performance at the same power,” he said.
The first chance to buy a laptop with the new chip will come in the first half of this year, with the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 and ZBook Ultra G1a (seriously, what is going on with PC naming this year?!) among the machines set to be powered by it.
Image: AMD
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