Last year, AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 mobile processors with reasonable fanfare during Computex in Taiwan, or at least, more fanfare than its most recent chip has received. Adding an entry-level option with the bare minimum specifications wouldn't normally be that interesting, which tracks with the quiet addition, but there's an interesting aspect to this little budget APU.
All six of the Ryzen AI 300 Series mobile chips feature an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) designed for local AI processing that's rated at 50 TOPS (Tera Operations per Second), which is above the 40 TOPS requirement for Copilot+ PC certification.
So, some jargon aside, the interesting part here is how upcoming AMD-based Copilot+ PCs could, potentially, be even cheaper (or match) the offerings featuring Qualcomm's ARM64-based Snapdragon X chip designed for ~$600 laptops. However, the silent drop might have something to do with some unusual spec counts that have enthusiasts debating its naming scheme.
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Ryzen | Cores | Threads | Max. clock | GPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
AI 9 HX 375 | 12 | 24 | Up to 5.1 GHz | Radeon 890M |
AI 9 HX 370 | 12 | 24 | Up to 5.1 GHz | Radeon 890M |
AI 9 365 | 10 | 20 | Up to 5 GHz | Radeon 880M |
AI 7 350 | 8 | 16 | Up to 5 GHz | Radeon 860M |
AI 5 340 | 6 | 12 | Up to 4.8 GHz | Radeon 840M |
AI 5 330 | 4 | 8 | Up to 4.5 GHz | Radeon 820M |
Previous generations of AMD's Ryzen mobile processors, such as the "Phoenix" 7000 Series, had denominations of Ryzen 3, 5, 7, and 9. The former, Ryzen 3, would traditionally feature a quad-core CPU, whereas the latest Ryzen AI 5 330 that just surfaced is, clearly, listed as a Ryzen 5 chip despite using the very same.
It was the same deal in "Hawk Point" 8040 Series with 4-core CPUs (Zen 4) sticking in the Ryzen 3 subcategory, so it's an unusual switch for this new budget Ryzen AI 300 Series processor, which remains unconfirmed as to whether it uses a "Strix Point" or "Krackan Point" (Zen 5) CPU chiplet (via Tom's Hardware).
Either way, the intention is for these mobile processors to feature in entry-level Copilot+ PCs, in line with how I suspect AI PCs will quietly become the standard for laptops, rather than an extraordinary variant — part of a "great PC reset" that we've been expecting since the dawn of Qualcomm's aggressive entry as an afordable AI PC provider with the announcement of Snapdragon X.
There haven't been any models confirmed to use the Ryzen AI 5 330 just yet, but I'd wager that we'll see the usual suspects in Acer, Lenovo, HP, and many more who have a broad collection of entry-level laptops, announcing some budget x86-64 (instead of ARM64) Copilot+ PCs in the next few months.
Naturally, power efficiency will likely be the all-encompassing theme of advertising for these theoretical AI laptops, particularly because the relatively weak integrated Radeon 820M GPU won't be up to much gaming outside of ultra-lightweight titles.
Otherwise, Microsoft's modern Copilot features like Windows Recall, Click to Do, and AI Search will run locally on AMD's 50 TOPS NPU within a (presumably) cheap range of new AI laptops that's still to surface. I'll keep my eyes peeled.
