AMD CES 2023 Keynote Live Blog: Ryzen 7000X3D, 65W CPUs, and RDNA 3 Announcements

AMD always draws a crowd -- there are currently over 5,000 people watching the livestream with 20 minutes to go before showtime. 

The show has begun, just a few minutes late, with a pre-recorded intro video. 

The head of the Consumer Technology Association, the group behind CES, Gary Shapiro, is making a short introductory speech to welcome AMD CEO Lisa Su to the stage. 

Lisa Su has taken to the stage after a short intro video that focused on the 'AMD, Together We Advance' branding. 

Su said she is ready to dive right into the new products that cover gaming, AI, sustainable computing, and other areas. 

Su is beginning with AI, which she says is the most important megatrend in tech, allowing us to make predictions about future outcomes. 

Lisa Su described the company's new XDNA architecture which encompasses the AI technology that the company purchased with Xilinx. AMD will use XDNA in its Ryzen Mobile 7040 series chips first. The new engine is called "Ryzen AI" and delivers up to 12 TFLOPS of performance. 

The 7040 processors, codenamed Phoenix, come with the Zen 4 CPU architecture and RDNA 3 graphics engine. It has 25 billion transistors. 

AMD presented benchmarks that show the 7040 series has a faster AI engine than the Apple M2 processors, and mentioned that Intel doesn't have an inbuilt AI engine to compare to. AMD also showed the Ryzen system being 35% faster than Apple and 45% faster than Intel's chips in Blender. 

Su says the 7040 series offers up to 40 hours of battery life. 

Su said that the company will need deep partnerships to develop the AI ecosystem. She invited Microsoft EVP Panos Panay to the stage to talk about the collaboration between the two companies. He complimented her jacket profusely, drawing laughter from the crowd and Lisa Su.  

Panoy discussed the partnership and other initiatives that AMD and Microsoft have worked on together, like bringing the Pluton security chip to AMD's processors. 

Panoy demoed some of the software that Microsoft has developed to use AMD's new Ryzen AI engine. That includes features in Microsoft Studio, like portrait blur, eye contact, and auto framing, all of which requires trillions of operations per second. These functions can run on the AI engine at milliwatts of power. This doesn't drain the battery while keeping the CPU and GPU free for more important work.

Lisa Su prompted Panos to tell us what the future of AI might look like. He says that AI will redefine what we do with Windows, but that it requires new compute capabilities and an operating system that blurs the line between the edge and the cloud. And with that, Panos took his leave from the stage. 

Su switched gears to talk about hybrid and remote work, with more than 80% of employees wanting to work from home, while more than half say that connectivity issues limit their work. AMD is working on making hybrid work 'frictionless.' Lisa Su called Enrique Lores, the CEO of HP, to the stage to talk about their efforts in this area. 

Yes, we're also ready for the talk to turn back to more new silicon. 

Lores says that 50% of the workforce will be freelancers in five years. Interesting.

HP announced its Dragonfly Pro laptop today, and it's powered by AMD and targeted for remote freelance workers. This laptop delivers 40% higher Passmark scores than Apple's M1, according to HP. 

Now Lisa Su is switching gears to gaming. Su says there are 3.2 billion gamers in the world, and most play on PCs and consoles. AMDs CPUs and GPUs power all sorts of gaming products, including handhelds, consoles, PCs, and even cars. 

Su introduced the new Ryzen 7450X CPUs, the first chiplet-based processors for laptops. They have up to 16 cores and 32 threads with the Zen 4 architecture and RDNA 2 graphics. These are basically Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs crammed into a laptop form factor. 

The 79450HX offers up impressive gains over the previous-gen. 

AMD introduced the Radeon RX 7600M XT mobile laptop graphics. Up to 26% faster framerates than the competition, according to AMD. These come to market in February. 

Matt Zielinski from Lenovo came to the stage to talk about their partnership. 

Lenovo is unveiling its first Legion Pro Series laptops tomorrow with the 7045HX processors. He says it is the most powerful gaming laptop Lenovo has ever created. 

Lisa is moving on to desktop CPUs now! She's talking about the Ryzen 7000X3D processors. AMD is bringing 3D V-Cache to Ryzen 7000 processors. This tech stacks more L3 on top of the chip to boost gaming performance. 

The Ryzen 7 7700X3D delivers on average up to 15% more gaming performance than the 5800X3D. 

AMD is also bringing V-Cache to Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 processors, with the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D coming with 16 cores and 32 threads. The Ryzen 9 7900X will have 12 cores and 24 threads. 

We now have an article on the site covering the 3D V-Cache chips. AMD is also launching the locked 65W Ryzen 7000 CPUs, three models, and low-cost budget motherboards. You can read about all of that here. 

Lisa Su is now talking about how computing can help to revolutionize health care and other fields through adaptive computing. 

Here are the details on the new Ryzen 7000 65W CPUs. These three new 65W Ryzen 7000 “non-X” models span the Ryzen 5 to Ryzen 9 families, thus providing a new lower level of entry to the AM5 platform to address some of the pricing issues associated with the company’s new AM5 platform. These chips will arrive January 10.

Lisa Su pivoted to the metaverse now, bringing Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson to the stage. AMD's chips power the Magic Leap devices. Though Magic Leap never lived up to the hype, it is now used in several scenarios, like surgery. 

Magic Leap 2 uses a custom processor from AMD paired with some of the company's own IP, thus creating the most advanced augmented reality system in the industry, at least according to Magic Leap. 

Former NASA astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman has come to the stage to talk about AMD's efforts in space, largely through its Xilinx arm. In the meantime, here's something about chips:

Here is some more info on the AMD mobile chips. 

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Here's a die shot of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. We took this pic during a briefing earlier today.  

Here are even more chips we pictured earlier today. I wrote labels for the chips you might not recognize. 

AMD is back on track, talking about its datacenter CPUs.

AMD launched its fourth-gen EPYC Genoa CPUs last November, which we reviewed here. Su touted its 300 world records and amazing power efficiency. 

Lisa Su says that 5 AMD servers can replace 15 Intel servers, thus saving incredible amounts of power. There are over 15 million servers worldwide. If they were all EPYC, they would save 52 billion k/Wh of power, and 26 million tons of C02. 

Su is announcing the company's new Alveo V70 inference accelerator. This is a Xilinx product. 

Lisa Su talked about how AMD now powers the fastest supercomputers in the world. AMD has now developed the first chip with both CPU and GPU and memory all into a single chip, the MI300. This has the CDNA3 architecture paired with 24 Zen 4 cores, all paired with 128GB of HBM3 memory. AMD is using 3D stacking to connect multiple GPU and CPU die together. 

Su showed us the chip, it's a beast! I held this chip earlier today and have other pics. This has 146 billion transistors. 

MI300 can reduce the time it takes to train the largest models, like ChatGPT, from months to weeks. This chip will launch in the second half of 2023. 

Lisa Su thanked the audience and closed the show. 

That's all, folks! Be sure to check out our writeups above.