It looks like we could be in for a huge naming scheme change for AMD's upcoming "Strix Point" APUs, with the new ASUS VivoBook S16 laptops featuring an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor.
We've never heard of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor, but ASUS lists it as a 12-core, 24-thread CPU that clocks at up to 5.1GHz with 36MB of cache and Ryzen AI performance of up to 77 TOPS. Until now, no "AI" wording has made it into any processor from AMD like this, so it looks like we could see the Ryzen AI 5, Ryzen AI 7, and Ryzen AI 9 series CPUs in the near future.
ASUS will unveil the new VivoBook S16 laptops at Computex 2024 next month, and I'm sure we're going to get the official naming from AMD at their Computex 2024 press conference. The new Strix Point CPUs aka Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor will deliver up to 77 TOPS of AI performance from its beefed-up XDNA2-based Ryzen AI NPU and newer RDNA 3.5 GPU. The NPU on its own will provide 45 TOPS of AI workload performance.
AMD's big branding change makes sense with its competitor changing things up big time recently, with Intel moving from naming its CPUs as Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 to Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 7, and Core Ultra 9 with the launch of its Meteor Lake CPUs late last year. The new desktop-bound Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake" CPUs will be the first desktop Intel CPUs under the new naming scheme.
This means that the new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs could be called something completely different, where we could expect something like the desktop CPUs to be called the Ryzen AI 9 9950X, or something close to that. It seems AMD is pushing all-in with AI if they're going to be putting it into the model number of their processor... and with just weeks to go until Computex 2024, we're waiting with our hype train tickets.
