More than two years ago at CES 2023, AMD unveiled its Ryzen AI technology indicating the direction the company"s next processors would be going. Ryzen AI made its debut with the 7040 series mobile Zen 4 APUs. However, as this was a first gen product and so the NPU (neural processing unit) throughput topped out at 10 TOPS (trillion operations per second).
Fast forward to December the same year, the company announced the succeeding 8040 series, and while the CPU was still based on Zen 4, the AI capabilities were much improved with a combined TOPS of 39, where the NPU itself saw a 60% boost, with it now reaching 16 TOPS.
However, this still was not enough to exceed Microsoft"s Copilot+ PC requirement. If you are not familiar, Microsoft Copilot+ PC is a term Microsoft uses for the new AI PCs specifically geared towards Windows 11 24H2. Only systems that have higher than 40 NPU TOPS are eligible to be labelled as a Copilot+ PC.
At Computex 2024 last June, AMD released new Ryzen AI 300 series APUs as it switched from the x000 series nomenclature to the new x00 series. With 300 chips, AMD debuted Zen 5 cores, RDNA 3.5 graphics, and XDNA 2-based NPU.
The Ryzen AI 300 series mobile lineup currently bottoms out with the Ryzen AI 5 340. However, today, the company is releasing a new entry-level SKU with the Ryzen AI 5 330 and what"s special about this that the new 330 APU still exceeds Microsoft"s Copilot+ PC requirement despite being just a quad-core processor and that"s because it gets the full NPU treatment like the more expensive options.
"The new AMD Ryzen AI 5 330 processor is designed to offer incredible everyday compute experiences in mainstream and affordable Copilot+ PCs. With 50 NPU TOPS, notebooks powered by AMD Ryzen AI 5 330 exceed Microsoft’s requirements for Copilot+ PCs, offering true next-gen AI experiences built for Windows 11," AMD says, describing the new APU. It adds "Systems powered by the Ryzen AI 5 330 processor will be available from OEMs, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI and arriving in market in the coming months."
Aside from the CPU core count, the integrated GPU on the AI 5 330 also takes a cut as it has only two Compute Units (CUs). The new processor boosts up to 4.5 GHz from its base clock of 2.0 GHz depending on the configurable TDP that runs between 15-28 watts.