AMD Announces Copilot+ PC Capable Chips for Laptops and Desktop PCs

AMD announced two new PC chipsets that meet the Copilot+ PC specifications and will arrive in new desktop and laptop PCs later this year.

“This is an incredibly exciting time for AMD as the rapid and accelerating adoption of AI is driving increased demand for our high-performance computing platforms,” AMD chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su says. “At Computex, we were proud to be joined by Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, Asus and other strategic partners to launch our next-generation Ryzen desktop and notebook processors.”

Those processors–the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and AMD Ryzen 9000 series–target laptops and desktop PCs, respectively, and each provides CPU (microprocessor), GPU (graphics), and NPU (accelerated AI) components that meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC specifications. Indeed, AMD is touting that they “exceed” this specification by delivering 50 TOPS of NPU performance, compared to the 40 TOPS Microsoft requires and the 45 TOPS delivered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipsets.

Both chipsets are built on AMD’s Zen5 CPU core, though the NPU architecture, called XDNA 2, is new. It delivers three times the performance of its predecessor, a low bar, and is the first NPU to support the “advanced Block FP16 data type,” which AMD says “delivers increased accuracy compared to lower precision data types used by competitive NPUs without sacrificing performance.”

No doubt in retaliation for its Qualcomm- and Surface-heavy Copilot+ PC launch event debacle, AMD convinced Microsoft to publicly admit that its new architecture “exceeds” the Copilot+ PC spec and it showed off new AMD-based laptops, like the HP Pavilion Aero, running various local AI tasks. But the desktop chips are in some ways more interesting, as they will tie AMD’s new CPUs and NPU with dedicated Radeon GPUs that should dramatically exceed the performance of Qualcomm-based PCs, especially for games, and will, of course, do so without requiring emulation.

Where these x86-based designs will always fall short, of course, is with efficiency. But that’s sort of the point of the PC ecosystem. We have a lot of choice and can pick according to our needs. And AMD could offer a compelling alternative to Intel-based systems, though we’ll likely know soon enough how those stack up.

Anyway, the Copilot+ PC confusion continues, though it’s clear that what AMD announced today will require new PCs based on these new chipsets. (With Nvidia, that’s still not clear.) But here’s some good news: New PCs–from companies like Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, and MSI–will arrive as soon as July.