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AMD Will Bring Its 'Ryzen AI' Processors To Standard Desktop PCs For First Time (arstechnica.com) 27

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD has been selling "Ryzen AI"-branded laptop processors for around a year and a half at this point. In addition to including modern CPU and GPU architectures, these are attempting to capitalize on the generative AI craze by offering chips with neural processing units (NPUs) suitable for running language and image-generation models locally, rather than on some company's server. But so far, AMD's desktop chips have lacked both these higher-performance NPUs and the Ryzen AI label. That changes today, at least a little: AMD is announcing its first three Ryzen AI chips for desktops using its AM5 CPU socket. These Ryzen AI 400-series CPUs are direct replacements for the Ryzen 8000G processors, rather than the Ryzen 9000-series, and they combine Zen 5-based CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, and an NPU capable of 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This makes them AMD's first desktop chips to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot+ PC label, which enables a handful of unique Windows 11 features like Recall and Click to Do.

The six chips AMD is announcing today -- the 65 W Ryzen AI 7 Pro 450G, Ryzen AI 5 Pro 440G, and Ryzen AI 5 Pro 435G, along with low-power 35 W "GE" variants -- all bear AMD's "Ryzen Pro" branding as well, which means they support a handful of device management capabilities that are important for business PCs managed by IT departments. At this point, it doesn't seem as though AMD will be offering boxed versions to regular consumers; the Ryzen AI desktop chips will appear mainly in business PCs that don't need a dedicated graphics card but still benefit from more robust graphics than AMD offers in regular Ryzen desktop CPUs. Like past G-series Ryzen chips, these are essentially laptop silicon repackaged for desktop systems. They share most of their specs in common with Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors, despite their Ryzen AI 400-series branding. The two chip generations are extremely similar overall, but the Ryzen AI 400-series laptop CPUs include slightly faster 55 TOPS NPUs.
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AMD Will Bring Its 'Ryzen AI' Processors To Standard Desktop PCs For First Time More

AMD Will Bring Its 'Ryzen AI' Processors To Standard Desktop PCs For First Time

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  • full of sound nd fury, sgnfyng nothng (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Thursday March 05, 2026 @04:58PM (#66024954)
    Thinking of installing a browser extension to remove the letters "A" and "I" from all web pages. You may say that will make the fetched pages harder to understand, but I think at this point the alternative is even worse.

  • cheap (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Turns out its cheap to add a bunch of low precision multiplication to a processor. But you can call it AI and charge more.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      For 4 and 8 bit values (regardless whether integer or "floating point") the operations may even just be in-CPU table look-ups. (Or maybe in-FGPA table look-ups, as AMD's "NPUs" seem to be just renamed FPGAs.)

    • Just as long as my keyboard continues to have a non-changeable Copilot button on it, which I use all the time!

    • Re:cheap (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Thursday March 05, 2026 @11:05PM (#66025602) Journal

      I'm just hoping this shit doesn't eat up too much die space on Zen 6, which I planned to upgrade to.

      Anything "AI" I could possibly want would be done way faster on my GPU.

      The crap's been jammed down my throat on the software side, but it for it to physically impede the operation of my CPU as well would be tragic.

      • I'd think an NPU is faster than a GPU. I'd like to see the difference in benchmarks though. According to what I've seen it's coming this year for RTX GPUs.

    • Re:cheap (Score:4, Informative)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Friday March 06, 2026 @01:31AM (#66025740)

      Maybe so but AMD's AI Max 395 processor can, with 128 GB of combined memory (in a $3000 glorified laptop), do a decent job of running OpenCode with a variant of the Qwen3 coding model. Not quite like Claude Opus, but almost as good as Sonnet, from my testing (accessing it via OpenRouter). A desktop version with 256GB of RAM would make a pretty capable coding agent machine, if it were only affordable to mere mortals, which it won't be.

    • But apparently what's not cheap is apparently software. As usual AMD are incredibly weak on that side and wonder why they never seem to get much traction. I invite you to figure out how to run an inference workload on the NPU on Linux.

      I looked into them as an alternative to NVidia Jetson (OMFG no I am not porting my software to Windows, literally no one in the company develops on Windows) for an edge compute workload and... it's the usual AMD shit. Apparently good specs, but unusable software.

      Fucking why? I

      • Fucking why?

        ATI was always shit at drivers, I had problems with them all the way back to the Mach32 and all the way up to the first PCI-E Radeons, where I just gave up and went to Nvidia. Now that AMD owns them, they still are. The AMD GPU Windows driver is still terrible. Only the OSS Linux driver is good.

        Unfortunately now the Nvidia linux graphics drivers are also really bad. Linux CUDA drivers are solid but the graphics driver isn't at all. You can really tell that Nvidia only cares at all about GPGPU on Linux. So y

  • who's going to buy some fancy new desktop when you can't afford enough RAM to run Windows acceptably?

  • ... than the existing 8700G model, with less CPU cores. The somewhat higher theoretical NPU rate is not something I have seen used for important purposes so far.
    • My problem with the 8700G is that i went all the way with ECC DDR5 (16 SR +16 SR +32 DR GB 5200) and the non pro G series CPUs actually don't support it, after AMD said way back when that from AM5 sockets onwards, all CPUs would. Ended up getting a regular CPU not a G series, and found the office desktop graphics fine for that machine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )
        Yeah, it was the day AMD's credibility died when they (and their board manufacturers, like Asus) had "supports ECC RAM" written all over their web pages, and then suddenly said "you know what, we disabled this feature, so we can sell you a PRO CPU for extra money, later".

        Too bad one cannot believe anything a company writes these days anymore, everything requires confirmation from independent third party testers.
        • To be fair, it's on AMD, the boards support it fine, if they have the wiring. And I think for AM5 boards that's mandatory. It's AMD 's loss, I now figured out for that machine the cheapest non-G CPU does fine. The only thing I'd like now for an upgrade is a 35W E cpu, but I think they only come as GE.

    • No they don't. Seems like they offer the same 8 cores, the same peak boost speed, significantly more cache, significantly better graphics system, and run on the Zen 5 architecture instead of Zen 4. The only stat that is lower is the base clock, and that is lower to coincide with Zen 5 being a generally more power efficient architecture with better clock speed control.

      On top of that you compare the top of the line 8000 series with just the first 3 products released in the new series. AMD specifically has not

  • in a AM3 slot?

  • Break the Nvidia monopoly.

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