AMD's Ryzen AI 300 Series Mobile APUs Should Be Interesting For Next-Gen Laptops
The new AMD Ryzen AI 300 series is quite exciting on the mobile side for further enhancing its capabilities over current Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" mobile processors and getting ready to battle the Intel Lunar Lake processors due out in Q3.
AMD Ryzen AI 300 series will feature up to 12 Zen 5 CPU cores for a total of 24 threads in the top-end SKUs. There is RDNA 3.5 graphics for an upgraded integrated graphics experience with up to 16 compute units. And the new XDNA 2 NPU is rated for delivering 50 TOPS performance for very competitive AI performance.
The top-end model announced for Computex 2024 is the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with 12 cores / 24 threads, a 5.1GHz maximum boost frequency, 36MB cache, 50 TOPS NPU, and Radeon 890M graphics. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 was also announced as a 10-core / 20-thread Zen 5 mobile APU with 5.0GHz maximum boost frequency, 34MB cache, 50 TOPS NPU, and Radeon 880M Graphics.
With the AMD XDNA 2 neural processing unit, AMD is talking up big gains with up to 5x the compute capacity and up to 2x the power efficiency. AMD is claiming that their 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen AI will be able to outperform not only the Intel Meteor Lake by wide margins but also the Apple M4, the anticipated performance of Intel Lunar Lake, and also the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X.
AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops should begin appearing in July.
AMD XDNA 2 sounds quite interesting but the level of Linux support is still less than desirable. Earlier this year AMD did publish an XDNA Linux driver but it's not mainlined in the Linux kernel, there's been no attempt to upstream it yet, and no clear roadmap plans yet shared by AMD. The user-space software support for the AMD XDNA Linux driver is also limited. So while AMD is known for their great CPU and GPU support on Linux, their NPU/XDNA effort has been off to a slower start. Meanwhile Intel already has upstreamed their iVPU driver for supporting their NPU found in Meteor Lake as well as already having Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake support in the upstream kernel. User-space software like OpenVINO is working fine with the iVPU kernel driver.
AMD is talking up the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 as having much better performance than the Apple M3 and Intel Core Ultra 155H. Of course, their benchmarks were with Microsoft Windows 11... And they talked up Windows Copilot+ and "next-gen Windows AI PCs" heavily in the presentation. We'll see how the Linux performance is overall once getting AMD Ryzen AI 300 series hardware in the Phoronix lab.
The RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics and Zen 5 CPU support should be in good shape right now for Linux use if using the very latest open-source upstream software. The main caveat is the less than ideal state of the XDNA Linux driver for the XDNA 2 NPU, which will hopefully be improving with time. That's all for now until seeing hardware for testing in the coming month(s) to deliver a first-hand Linux report.
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