CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 1

Intel's Arrow Lake desktop processors are going to be out in October, or at least that's the word from Computex 2024.

This comes from Wccftech which has been tapping motherboard makers at Computex, firms that are showing off their Z890 boards - and have inside info on the Arrow Lake release timeframe.

Note that the mentioned October date is for Arrow Lake CPUs to be on shelves, not just some kind of initial reveal. In fact, the announcement of the next-gen desktop processors is planned to happen at Intel Innovation in September (which has been previously mentioned via the rumor mill).

Qualcomm held its Computex 2024 keynote earlier today, hyping both the Copilot+ PC ecosystem and its new Snapdragon X Series processors.

In the Qualcomm Computex 2024 keynote YouTube video above, at the 11:34 mark Neowin reports that Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon said that these initial laptops being released are just the first wave of Windows PCs that will feature Snapdragon X Elite chips.

Qualcomm teased renders of PCs with Snapdragon X Elite chips inside, with Amon saying that the new Snapdragon X Series chips will be inside all sorts of form factor PC systems. The company had some slides up that showed off tablet designs, Mini-PCs, and even all-in-one PC systems.

Qualcomm has just hosted its Computex 2024 keynote, with president and CEO Cristiano Amon joined by tech industry leaders on stage, including from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Samsung for the industry shift in the PC space enabled by Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X series processors.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said: "The PC is reborn. Copilot+ PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built with AI integrated throughout the system and can deliver multi-day battery life. I am grateful to the partners that joined me on stage today to celebrate this industry shift that puts Snapdragon powered Windows Copilot+ PCs at the forefront of technology innovation. Together, we are redefining the personal computing experience, and enabling developers to efficiently create apps for this new generation".

The new Snapdragon X series chips were the big focus, with Amon highlighting the NPU inside of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processors as the "key differentiator and reason why performance of PCs powered by Snapdragon X Series is superior and makes Copilot+ experiences possible".

AMD has announced its new chips for Copilot+ AI PCs, the latest AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series, at Computex. These chips deliver 50 TOPS of AI performance with next-gen Zen 5 CPU Cores and beefed-up RDNA 3.5 graphics. The latter will make these chips great for PC gaming on compact machines - especially handhelds!

As part of its presentation comparing the performance between the flagship Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the Snapdragon X Elite Arm-based SoC with built-in GPU, AMD notes a 60% performance increase in favor of Ryzen using the 3DMark Night Raid Graphics benchmark.

This is partly due to the fact that it's an x86 chip without an emulation layer, but the performance increase also comes from the 16 Compute Units, up from 12 CUs in the previous gen Ryzen 7040 Series and Ryzen 8040 Series.

AMD's AI processing for laptops and portable devices is leveling up big time with the new Ryzen AI 300 Series, powered by Zen 5, XDNA 2, and RDNA 3.5 graphics. Described as the 'World's Best Processor for Copilot+ PCs,' they launch in July with two models - the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the Ryzen AI 9 365.

Yes, the new naming for AMD's SoCs is real and works like this: Ryzen AI is the new brand name denoting a powerful dedicated NPU (here, it's the third-gen XDNA 2), 300 is the series, and the 9 HX stuff is the model info that AMD traditionally puts at the end of Ryzen CPU model naming.

With AMD's third-generation XDNA 2 NPU technology, Ryzen AI 300 Series processors are Copilot+ ready. The impressive 50 TOPS of AI performance push them past the Snapdragon X Elite, Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake, and Apple's M4 chips. This is a massive increase from the 10 TOPS for the Ryzen 7040 Series and 16 TOPS for the Ryzen 8040 Series.

At Computex 2024, AMD has formally announced its next-generation desktop CPUs, the new Ryzen 9000 Series, which will launch in July with four models. Powered by the next-gen Zen 5 architecture, AMD noted in its presentation to the press that this was more than a "trivial update" for Zen but a "sweeping update" with advances that deliver 2X data and instruction bandwidth and, of course, big performance gains for AI.

AMD says there's an average 16% IPC uplift compared to Zen 4, with the chart outlining the improvement across a range of gaming, rendering, and other CPU workloads. Far Cry 6 sees a 10% uplift on the low-end, and Octane and Cinebench R23 are in the middle with 16% and 17%, respectively. On the high-end, you've got Blender with an impressive 23% uplift and Geekbench 5.4 with a massive 35%. Zen 5 is a definite step up from Zen 4.

The four models that are set to debut in July are AM5 ready: the flagship AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X. One of the other big things with Zen 5 is that the performance increases come with an improvement in power efficiency, with the Ryzen 9 9950X (16 Cores/32 Threads) featuring a 170W TDP, which is on par with the Zen 4 Ryzen 9 7950X.

AMD's Ryzen 9000 launch has been leaked ahead of Computex, although we should add a hefty helping of seasoning with this one.

The leak comes from Wxnod on X (formerly Twitter) and is supposedly a deck of presentation slides from AORUS (GIGABYTE), but separately, CodeCommando has also spilled the specs of AMD's initial Zen 5 desktop CPUs. (Hat tips to Wccftech and VideoCardz respectively here).

While the two leaks appear to match, and show an initial four chips that AMD is set to unleash, we should still be very cautious about all this.

Intel has penciled in its annual Innovation event for September 24 this year, hosted in San Jose, California as usual. We should expect a huge focus on the next-gen Core Ultra CPUs, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, Xeon 6, and Gaudi 3 news.

Intel's upcoming Innovation event will run between September 24-25, where we should see the official launch of Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake" desktop CPUs, with an update on what's coming to mobile with Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs. We should expect a hard launch of Intel's new high-end Xeon "Granite Rapids-AP" processors, as well as an update on Intel's Gaudi 3 AI accelerators during the event.

The upcoming Lunar Lake CPUs from Intel will be the big focus of the show, as they'll be the first true AI PC processors after the launch of the Core Ultra 100 series "Meteor Lake" CPUs. We've got Computex 2024 before Intel Innovation, so expect some reveals and teases during the show, with more news during Intel Innovation in September.

NVIDIA and MediaTek are expected to announce their new custom Arm-based "AI PC" processor at Computex 2024 next week.

In a new report from CTEE and picked up by Wccftech, the big cooperation between NVIDIA and MediaTek will be announced. Until now, it has been rumors and whispers... but the big announcement is going to happen at Computex 2024, which is perfect.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang flew into Taiwan this week, where he's meeting the whose-who of the tech industry: TSMC, MediaTek, GIGABYTE, Pegatron, and other manufacturers that aren't as well known in the industry but are invaluable including Wistron and Wiwing.

NVIDIA's next-generation AI PC processor will feature Arm-based Blackhawk CPU cores, Blackwell RTX GPU cores, and next-gen LPDDR6 memory.

The new details on NVIDIA's next-gen Arm-based AI PC processor comes from @XpeaGPU on X, quoting an article that talked about a new handheld and console SoC designed by NVIDIA based on the same architecture. NVIDIA looks to use multiple next-gen IPs on a single package, similar to how AMD and Intel are rolling out their new processors with CPU cores, GPU cores, NPUs, and even on-package memory.