AMD Zen 5 processors rival MacBook performance

The year 2024 will be remembered as an important turning point in the technology world. Microsoft has managed to turn Windows laptops into serious competitors to MacBooks, thanks to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips. However, AMD is also entering the scene with its ambitious new chips to take its place in this competition.

At a two-day event held in Los Angeles last week, AMD introduced its new Strix Point Ryzen AI chips. These chips are built on the company’s completely new Zen 5 architecture. Zen 5 is a significant leap forward over AMD’s previous generation chip architecture, delivering more instruction processing capacity per clock cycle and higher gaming frame rates with just 15W of power.

AMD claims to surpass MacBook performance

At the event, AMD claimed that the new Ryzen chips surpass the performance offered by the MacBook Air in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering and gaming. It also stated that it is 15% faster than the M3 Pro in Cinebench testing and supports up to four displays, unlike the MacBook Air.

AMD also emphasized that its new integrated graphics outperform Qualcomm’s current generation and Intel’s previous generation chips and can even “run triple-A games in full HD.” AMD’s NPU claims to deliver higher performance than rivals launching this year, performing 50 trillion floating point operations per second.

However, it is not possible to verify these claims for now. It was not possible to observe the performance of AMD’s new Ryzen AI chips at the event. Most AI demos weren’t running on AMD’s NPU, and even the most powerful gaming laptop shown was running on Nvidia graphics cards.

Performance increase with Zen 5 architecture

Ryzen AI chips are said to be significantly faster than AMD’s previous generation laptop chips. AMD stated that the new Zen 5 CPU architecture offers an average of 16% more command processing capacity. Additionally, the new RDNA 3.5 GPU architecture provides 19% to 32% more graphics performance at 15 watts of power.

Although AMD’s new chips are theoretically more efficient, it avoided providing clear information about battery life. At the event, it was stated that battery life will last “all day,” meaning eight hours or more. However, this has long been the standard for many thin and light laptops.

Asus’ Zenbook S16 model reflects the thin and light design that AMD aims for. However, this model is not as light and thin as the MacBook Air. Zenbook S16 weighs 1.5 kg and is 1.15 cm thick, the same weight and thickness as the 15-inch Air.

AMD claimed its 50 TOPS NPU is five times faster than Intel’s Meteor Lake. However, existing demos did not demonstrate this performance. The AI ​​programs shown were mostly running on the CPU or integrated graphics.

Strix Point Ryzen AI chips with AMD’s new Zen 5 architecture will be released on July 28. With MacBook and Snapdragon laptops taking their place in this market, the competitiveness of AMD’s x86 Zen 5 architecture is of great importance. If AMD is successful, the pressure will be even greater ahead of Intel’s Lunar Lake release. However, if AMD fails, Intel will have to prove that its older PC chips are still competitive.