Jay Peters
AMD’s CES keynote is about to start.
You can watch it on YouTube, and I’ve embedded the livestream below. We’ll be watching, too!
AMD
AMD is one of the world’s biggest computer chip companies, best known for its fierce competition with Intel. It’s a rivalry that really kicked off in the early 2000s when AMD’s Athlon and Opteron processors saw great success. While AMD has often struggled to keep up with Intel, its latest Ryzen CPUs are some of the most competitive chips it has produced in years. AMD also acquired ATI in 2006, a 3D graphics card company. It now produces a variety of Radeon GPUs that compete with Nvidia’s GeForce line of graphics cards. AMD also produces the chips found in the latest PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and the Valve Steam Deck, and it re-entered the server market with its Epyc brand in 2017.
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Verge Score
The AMD Strix Point CPU in the Zephyrus G16 gives this gaming laptop a battery life boost over the Intel version.
Jonathan Hilburg
Tom Warren
AMD’s next-gen RDNA4 GPUs appear in code.
AMD could be about to announce its next-generation GPUs at CES 2025 in January, and now AMD’s own ROCm library is referencing two unannounced GPUs. The RX 8800 and RX 8600 have both appeared in the ROCm code, just as AMD’s graphics boss Jack Huynh has confirmed he’s holding a CES keynote. Nvidia is also rumored to be launching its RTX 5000 series GPUs at CES.
Sean Hollister
AMD’s next-generation RDNA 4 gaming graphics look like a lock for CES in January.
Lisa Su confirmed she’d launch the first RDNA 4 GPUs in “early 2025,” and now AMD graphics boss Jack Huynh will officially host a livestreamed press conference on January 6th at 11AM PT / 2PM ET. It will “discuss how AMD is expanding its leadership across PCs and gaming.”
The rumor mill is expecting the unannounced AMD RX 8800 XT:
Jay Peters
Layoffs at AMD.
The company is laying off 4 percent of its staff, which translates to about 1,000 employees, reports CNBC. AMD has been transitioning into an AI chip company as it works to compete with Nvidia, which is now the most valuable company in the world thanks in large part to its AI chips.
AMD’s 7800X3D successor is also better at non-gaming workloads this time around.
Tom Warren
Sean Hollister
Today I learned AMD is sending chips to space, powering new SpaceX Starlink internet satellites.
Did you know SpaceX’s “latest generation broadband satellites” use AMD chips? The chipmaker just bragged about that in Q3 2024 earnings, and it’s news to me.
AMD’s product page says: “AMD Versal Adaptive SoCs combine application processors, real-time processors, and vector processors with traditional FPGA resources such as programmable logic fabric, DSP resources, and embedded memory.”
Sean Hollister
AMD’s AI earnings continue to rise, while game console fortunes continue to decline.
New PlayStations and Xboxes can’t come soon enough — Q3 gaming revenue is $462M, down from $648M last quarter and $922M before that, “primarily due to a decrease in semi-custom revenue.”
But Q3 earnings are up on the AI boom, once again pulling in double the data center dollars they did last year. No wonder AMD’s now prioritizing AI over gaming.
Image: AMD
Sean Hollister
AMD’s AI chips are coming for Nvidia — but how quickly?
AMD says the MI325X, shipping Q4, will beat Nvidia’s H200. But Nvidia seems a step ahead; it’ll ship “several billion dollars” of its next-gen Blackwell B200 GPU in Q4, too. AMD says its Blackwell competitor, the MI355X, won’t arrive till 2H 2025.
AMD isn’t talking price, but told us it’ll undercut Nvidia when it comes to total cost of ownership.
1/19Tap through our gallery for info about the upcoming MI355X, too. Images: AMD
Tom Warren
AMD’s latest $4.9 billion AI acquisition is all about competing with Nvidia.
AMD is acquiring ZT Systems, a leading provider of AI infrastructure. AMD is calling it a “next major step” for its AI training and inferencing solutions, in a move that will clearly help it compete with Nvidia’s dominance in AI offerings. ZT Systems will join the AMD’s data center solutions group once the $4.9 billion transaction closes.
Emma Roth
Sean Hollister
This unannounced AMD graphics chip is coming to a handheld docking station near you.
OneXPlayer just spilled the beans on the AMD Radeon RX 7800M — cuz it’ll be in its new graphic dock, the OneXGPU2. As Liliputing points out, the last time someone designed a portable eGPU around a Radeon laptop chip, most other boutique handheld makers followed suit.
Big FPS boosts for handhelds when docked, I hear, but quite pricey too.
Sean Hollister
Jess Weatherbed
AMD’s Zen 5 processors will arrive on July 31st.
There are four CPUs in the new Ryzen 9000 series, which includes the beastly 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X flagship. Pricing still hasn’t been disclosed, but it’s currently expected to align with the Zen 4 series chips.
Image: AMD
Emma Roth
AMD will acquire an AI startup for $665 million.
The Finland-based Silo AI is described as the “largest private AI lab in Europe” and has provided AI solutions for companies like Phillps, Rolls-Royce, and Unilever. In addition to Silo AI, AMD also acquired the AI startup Nod.ai last year as it aims to keep up with the likes of Nvidia.
Sean Hollister
PC industry growth wasn’t a fluke.
IDC and Canalys disagree whether this is the second or third consecutive quarter of growth, but either way, the slump is definitively behind us — and we haven’t even seen the impact of this year’s Qualcomm, AMD and Intel chip launches yet.
