“Ryzen AI 9 HX 170”: AMD changes naming scheme for mobile chips
Asus is preparing to unveil new notebooks and mentions an "AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170" for the first time on its website. This indicates a new naming scheme.
Asus-Notebook Vivobook S14 OLED (M5406) mit AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170
(Bild: Asus)
The Computex IT trade fair in Taipei is casting its shadow: numerous companies are planning to unveil new products there. Information that should probably not be revealed until Computex at the beginning of June is already leaking out.
An overview of model variants of the 14-inch Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED (M5406) notebook has appeared on the Asus website. This website mentions a previously unknown "AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 170 Processor". This is likely to be a representative of the new generation of mobile processors with Zen 5 microarchitecture developed by AMD under the codename "Strix Point".
AMD itself has so far only announced rough details about Strix Point: In addition to Zen 5 technology, it includes a significantly faster AI unit (NPU), which is expected to have around three times the performance of the previous XDNA unit. Asus now mentions the value of up to 77 tops for "Ryzen AI" for the Ryzen AI 9 HX 170, which presumably refers to the aggregated Int8 or Int16 performance of the NPU as well as the integrated GPU and CPU cores.
Asus also mentions twelve CPU cores (the Ryzen 8040 series has a maximum of eight), 24 threads and up to 5.1 GHz Turbo clock frequency.
NPU arms race for AI PCs
If Asus has indeed leaked the future name of the new mobile Ryzens, then AMD is emphasizing the AI functions with the CPU name "Ryzen AI".
This is likely a reaction to the announcement of numerous new Windows laptops with the new ARM processors Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus expected on May 21 at Microsoft Build. Qualcomm is also emphasizing the NPU in these chips, which is more powerful than the NPUs previously installed by AMD (in Ryzen 7040 and 8040) and Intel (Core Ultra), each with 10 to 16 tops of AI computing power. They are all aimed at so-called "AI PCs", i.e., notebooks and (mini) PCs with higher AI computing power.
There is also speculation that Microsoft could also announce at Build that more "Copilot" functions will run locally on AI PCs in future, but that these will have to provide a certain minimum computing power for AI data formats such as FP16, FP8, Int16, Int8 and BF16. There is talk of at least 40 tops.
It is also expected that Intel's upcoming CPU generations Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) and Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200) will deliver significantly more tops.
(ciw)
