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
up until then was functionally a monopoly in both the server and the mobile space.
Now, that level of stagnation, that's not where AMD is today.
But if there are new product announcements today
or anything to go by, the warning signs are starting to show.
In no particular order we've got, a darn near one-to-one rebrand
of their last-generation laptop chips, a couple new entries in the incredible,
but obscenely expensive Strix Halo chip family,
a better-binned refresh of the 9800X3D
called the 9850X3D, and some AI performance and usability improvements.
I mean, none of these are bad things, but the complete lack of any pricing information
is a little ominous and raises another uncomfortable bit of news
that AMD didn't mention,
the rumored price hikes that are coming on consumer GPUs.
Let's talk through all of that. After an uncomfortable segue to our sponsor.
As a wise man once said, when you can't innovate in engineering,
innovate in marketing, the unwashed masses who buy our shit
won't know the difference anyway. Okay, that's not entirely fair.
To AMD's credit, there are some improvements in the new Ryzen AI 400 series.
Everything highlighted in gold here is new, but the part that they leave off is how much new they are.
Maximum boost clocks of 5.2 gigahertz on a mobile CPU.
I mean, that's incredible. It's just that that's only 0.1 gigahertz more
than the Ryzen AI 300 series, which wouldn't be an issue.
I mean, clock speeds, not everything, except that they're also reusing the same mix
of Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores.
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 gonna make a 2% difference
in boost clock noticeable day to day. The bump 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 gonna 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 be generational downgrades.
The Ryzen AI 7 445, for instance,
gets lower clocks, less cash, and the same RAM speed compared to the Ryzen AI 5 340.
And this comes at the same time that Intel's Panther Lake
is rumored to deliver GPU performance gains of like 50%.
That's the yikes. Next up is the 9850X3D,
a truly impressive looking 5.6 gigahertz 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 watt monster
with an alleged 192 megabytes of level three cache.
But instead, all we got was a speedbind eight 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 megahertz faster clock speeds
than the old King, which is nice. But how does that translate to real world gaming performance?
Well, it's kind of hard to say. See, rather than comparing their own chips directly,
AMD instead compared their new hotness to Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K,
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 think of it, it's probably just as well that gamers will need to come to me
for their benchmarks anyway. Thanks. The Ryzen AI Max Plus announcement.
Ooh, this one was shaping up to be a real rebranding snooze fest.
I was sitting there thinking like, really, you guys are gonna remind me that Strix Halo can go on 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 five level graphics in a mobile chip,
but don't wanna pay an extra $500 for the 16 core model.
So we put the best graphics on an eight core
and a 12 core. Man, I've been using the GPD Win 5
for the last little while for gaming. This thing absolutely shreds Clare Obscure.
And 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.
Unfortunately, Strix 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 chatbots 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 end user 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 to feed an AI agent,
your pay stubs, 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 Rock'em with respect to performance improvements
and Windows compatibility, and they announced a handful of new features, 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, AMD says it must be working. They've seen two and a half X 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 Strix Halo Elite Book 8.
This thing is 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 gonna 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 LTT to keep up with the latest tech, so they wouldn't even know
about our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video,
why not check out the ShortCircuit I did on the GPD Win 5.
This may not be Strix Halo at its best. It is a little bit thermally constrained in this form factor,
but it might be Strix Halo at its coolest.
This is a real house holding it upside down. This is a really awesome gaming handheld.