Do you remember that one time when Intel launched the world's first quad core
consumer CPU and then 10 years later was
still doing the same thing? Okay. Yes, yes, I know there were plenty of other
innovations along the way, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel's
long-term stagnation did create an opening for AMD to not only continue
existing, but against all odds to close
the technology gap, taking serious market share from a company that up
until then was functionally a monopoly in both the server [music] and the
mobile space. Now, that level of stagnation, that's not where AMD is
today. But if their new product
announcements today are anything to go by, the warning signs are starting to
show. In no particular order, we've got a darn near 1:1 rebrand of their last
generation laptop chips. A couple new entries in the incredible but obscenely
expensive Stricks Halo chip family, a better bend refresh of the 9800 X3D
called the [music] 9850X3D, and some AI performance and usability
improvements. I mean, none of these are bad things, but the complete [music]
lack of any pricing information is a little ominous and raises another
uncomfortable bit of news that AMD uh [clears throat] didn't [music] mention,
the rumored price hikes that are coming on consumer GPUs. Let's talk through all
of that after an uncomfortable segue
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Okay, that's [music] not entirely fair. To AMD's credit, there are some
improvements in the new Ryzen AI 400 series. [music]
Everything highlighted in gold here is new, but the part that they leave off is
how much new they are. [music] Maximum boost clocks of 5.2 GHz on a mobile CPU.
I mean, that's incredible. It's just that that's only.1 GHz more than the
Ryzen AI 300 [music] series, which
wouldn't be an issue. I mean, clock speed's not everything except that they
are also reusing the same mix of Zen 5
and Zen 5C cores. [music] So, when
you're talking about mobile processors that are often limited by their cooling
solutions and power delivery anyway, no amount of gold text is going to make a
2% difference in boost clock noticeable day-to-day. The bump [music] in LPDDR5
speed is welcome though, especially for applications that rely on the GPU core
that is also faster, albeit just 7%. And
it's not going to hurt to be able to run local AI slightly faster. With all that
said, the devil's in the details. And while AMD's slide is technically true,
it's only true for the top skew. And as we make our way down the lineup, the
generational upgrades slowly fall away to make room for what appear in some
cases to [music] be generational downgrades. The Ryzen AI7445,
for instance, [music] gets lower clocks, less cache, and the same RAM speed
compared to the Ryzen AI 5340. And this
comes at the same time that Intel's Panther Lake is rumored to deliver GPU
performance gains of like 50%.
That's a yikes. Next up is the 9850 X3D,
a truly impressive looking 5.6 GHz
desktop chip that promises to once again steal AMD's gaming performance crown and
give it to AMD. But again, probably not
by as much as we'd hope or as much as
was rumored. See, the internet's been ablaze with rumors of a 9950x3D2,
a dual 3DV cache, 16 core, 200 W monster
with an alleged 192 MGB of level three
cache. But instead, all we got was a Speed [music] Bend 8 core. Once again,
this looks like a really nice piece of kit. We get the same rated power as last
gen along with up to 400 MHz faster
clock speeds than the old King, which is nice. But um how does that [music]
translate to real world gaming performance? Well, it's kind of hard to
say. See, rather than comparing their own chips directly, AMD [music] instead
compared their new hotness to Intel's Core Ultra 9285K, which is kind of like
a real boxer fighting Jake Paul. Fair
enough, AMD. It isn't really my place to tell you how to bully your competitors.
And come to think of it, it's probably just as well that gamers will need to
come to me for their benchmarks anyway. [music] Thanks. The Ryzen AIAX Plus
announcement. Ooh, this one was shaping up to be a real rebranding snoozefest. I
was sitting there thinking like, really? You guys are going to remind me that Stricks Halo can go in a desktop? I
literally invested in a company that is doing that framework investment
disclosure. But then AMD was like, "Boom. We heard that you love
astonishingly fast PlayStation 5 level graphics in a mobile chip, but don't
want to pay an extra $500 for the 16
core model. So, we put the best graphics
on an 8 core and a 12 core. Man, I've
been using the GPD Win 5 for the last little while for gaming. This thing
absolutely [music] shreds Clare Obscure at like epic
details. No upscaling tom foolery. Like if I could save hundreds of dollars on
CPU cores that I don't need. Absolutely
killer. [music] Unfortunately, Stricks Halo is killer
for your wallet, too, since even the entry level is crazy expensive. But hey,
cool new product is a cool new product. AMD then talked for a while about
running near cloud quality local AI models that save you from either the
limitations of free AI chat bots or the cost of a subscription. The partner they
showcased was Liquid AI, who has scary
call to talk about pricing buttons on their corporate licenses, but at this
time does provide enduser access to their models for free. So that's
actually pretty neat. But then things got totally off the rails. I'm writing
this based on my pre-briefing, so it is possible that the public presentation is
a little bit different in the details. But after the local models, AMD shifted
to talking about the idea of using iterate.ai AI to feed an AI agent your
payubs, bank information, tax returns,
and all that kind of stuff, and then have it generate powerful financial
advice, saving you the cost of hiring a financial planner. Direct quote
incoming. You can do it yourself. Now,
look, I'm not saying you should spend a bunch of money on a financial planner,
and there are clear privacy benefits to running workloads like this locally.
But, and to be clear, this is financial
advice. Do not trust an AI to give you financial advice without also having it
thoroughly vetted. At least not for now.
AMD then talked for a while about the strides that they've made recently on
Rockom with respect to performance improvements and Windows compatibility,
and they announced a handful of new features, [music] including Oh, okay.
So, it's just integration with Comfy UI and a simplified install method. To be
clear, I'm not mad. Those are both good things. It's just don't make me read
through four enhancements when two of them are just we changed the software
version number by 0.1 and we have support for the freshly rebranded
version of last year's AI processor. Why
is everything called AI? I know I'm just a lowly tech YouTuber, but like
is this stuff really working? I mean, [music] AMD says it must be working.
They've seen 2 and 1/2x growth year-over-year for their Ryzen AI
family. Except that, guys, I'm just not
convinced that that's why anyone is flocking to AMD mobile chips right now.
To be clear, I love my Stricks Halo Elite Book 8. This thing is [music]
freaking awesome. But the co-pilot
button has nothing to do with why I like it. I like the performance and I like
the battery life. The AI branding thing has gotten so over the top that at this
point it's hard for me to even tell what of it is a begrudging, well, we've got
to shoehorn this into everything or our shareholders will abandon us and what is
a genuine misunderstanding of what is driving customers to purchase your
products. To be clear, I don't think anyone's going to be upset in the coming
years about having a decent NPU so they can generate weird hybrid animals or
13-fingered French mimes or whatever it is they're into. But I promise you that
the other parents in my kids classes, they don't care if their PC is AI or
not, and they don't even know what it means. Then again, they don't use LT to
keep up with the latest tech, so they wouldn't even know about our sponsor,
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link in the video description. You guys enjoyed this video? Hey, shout out
HyperX Arena for clearing aside enough of these boxes that we were able to use
their shooting space. And uh hey, maybe go check out the ShortCircuit that I
did on the GPD Win 5. It's maybe not the
uh most practical application of Stricks Halo, but it is one of the coolest ones.
This is an amazing little handheld.