AMD debuts latest AI chips as it battles rivals Nvidia, Intel

AMD showed off a number of new AI chips during its Advancing AI event in California on Thursday. Read More...

AMD (AMD) debuted its latest artificial intelligence chips during its Advancing AI 2024 event in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday.

The flurry of announcements comes as AMD continues to battle AI market leader Nvidia (NVDA) and looks to take greater market share from longtime rival Intel (INTC) in the server CPU space.

The company showed off its new 5th Gen AMD EPYC central processing units (CPU) for servers, provided details on its Instinct MI325X AI accelerator, and showed off its Ryzen AI PRO 300 processors for AI PCs for enterprise customers.

AMD contended that its top-of-the-line 5th Gen EPYC 9965 chips, which cost $14,813, beat out Intel’s fifth-generation Xeon server chips — with servers running AMD’s processors offering 4x faster video transcoding times; 3.9x improvements in time to insights, the time it takes to turn data into useable information for science and high-performance computing applications; and 1.6x performance per core in virtualized infrastructure.

In other words: AMD wants you to know its chip can outpace Intel’s in certain scenarios.

Intel debuted its next-generation Xeon 6 chip in September, but AMD says it hasn’t been able to get its hands on the processor to test it against its EPYC chip.

AMD, on Thursday, debuted its latest EPYC AI processor during its AI event in California. (Image: AMD) (AMD)

On the AI accelerator side, AMD offered more details about its MI325X chip. The company says the data center processor beasts out Nvidia’s popular H200 AI chip when it comes to memory bandwidth and capacity, with the MI325X providing 256GB of HBM3E, a form of high-bandwidth memory used in AI processors.

AMD said the MI325X features 1.8x higher memory capacity than Nvidia’s H200 and 1.3x more bandwidth. According to the chipmaker, companies including Dell (DELL), Eviden, Gigabyte, HPE (HPE), Lenovo (LNVGF), and Super Micro Computer (SMCI) will begin offering MI325-based platforms in the first quarter of 2025.

The company also said it’s gearing up for its MI350X, the follow-up to the MI325X, which will debut in the second half of next year. Nvidia, meanwhile, is working with customers to deploy its next-generation Blackwell-based AI servers.

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The data center has become the new battlefield for AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, as the companies seek to take advantage of the ongoing AI gold rush and grab as many customers as possible.

And that’s translated to some big time cash for AMD and Nvidia. In its most recent quarter, AMD reported record Data Center sales of $2.8 billion, up 115% year over year. Still, that’s a far cry from Nvidia’s Data Center business, which reported revenue of $26.3 billion, jumping 154% year over year.

Intel, on the other hand, is contending with a massive turnaround effort as it looks to regain its footing in the data center space. In its most recent quarter, the company reported that its Data Center revenue fell 3% year over year, dropping to $3 billion. The decline is part of a broader trend for Intel, which saw its full-year 2023 Data Center revenue fall a staggering 20% compared to 2022.

AMD also showed off its RYZEN chip for AI PCs. (Image: AMD) (AMD)

In addition to its data center offerings, AMD showed off its new Ryzen AI PRO 300 processors for enterprise PCs. The company says its high-end version of the PRO 300, the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375, gets 40% better performance and 14% faster productivity performance than Intel’s Core Ultra 7 165U chip.

But the 165U is one of Intel’s first-generation Core Ultra processors, and the company has already announced its second-generation Core Ultra chips, which Intel says offer both better performance and battery life than its first-generation offerings.

Both AMD and Intel are chasing the hope that AI PCs will goose PC sales, as enterprise and commercial customers look to replace the aging PCs they bought at the onset of the pandemic. So far, however, those efforts aren’t bearing much fruit.

According to Gartner, PC shipments fell in the third quarter, despite the hype around AI PCs. Still, with the holiday season around the corner, there’s ample opportunity for the companies to pitch consumers on the benefits of AI PCs. Whether customers will listen is another story.