Image: IDG
Next year will likely be the first year of the AI PC, and chipmakers are racing to be the ones powering it. This week, AMD launched its Ryzen 8040 series of mobile CPUs alongside new Instinct hardware for the datacenter. AMD explained it all in a special episode of The Full Nerd podcast.
First up: Jason Banta, AMD’s client CPU chief, who spoke to Adam Patrick Murray and myself about the Ryzen 8000 series of mobile chips and how they’ll enable local chatbot and AI-powered features. Pay attention to the release of the Ryzen AI Software, which “quantizes” a ChatGPT-esque large language model AI into a format that can be used on a Ryzen CPU. Think of it like image compression for AI — it’s pretty cool and a problem that I didn’t even know could be solved!
David McAfee, corporate vice president of client channel, then joined Adam to discuss Threadripper, especially the Threadripper 7000 — which is back on client PCs! AMD wants Threadripper to be at the forefront of client development, and McAfee explains how that will happen.
Mahesh Balasubramanian, director of product marketing at AMD, then steps in alongside Adam and Serve The Home’s Patrick Kennedy (possibly the nicest guy in tech media) to talk about the enterprise Instinct platform and APUs. This goes a bit beyond PCWorld’s traditional wheelhouse, so Patrick, Adam, and especially Mahesh do an excellent job describing what enterprise APUs mean for enterprise AI. Afterwards, Adam, Patrick, and myself wrap it all up.
The bottom line? We’re just getting started in AI.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor
As PCWorld’s senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.