With Qualcomm's Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs ready to launch, it's competitors don't want to be left out in the cold. AMD has begun announcing its next-gen Ryzen products at Computex today, which are based on Zen 5.

Codenamed Strix Point, these new laptop chips are all about AI, promising 50 TOPS. Strangely, AMD is only announcing its mobile Ryzen 9 units, rather than the whole family.

There's new branding too. Rather than Ryzen 9000, this is called Ryzen AI 300.

To 50 TOPS, or not to 50 TOPS

There are more questions than answers

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X family will get you 45 INT8 TOPS, so AMD is promising the best NPU performance out there thanks to its new XDNA2 architecture. That's great news for anyone planning to use Ryzen in their next laptop. Moreover, the firm is promising a block FP16 data type, where you'll get INT8 speeds with FP16 accuracy.

AMD wasn't clear how it achieves this. The way these things tend to work is that INT8 is faster but less accurate, while FP16 is slower but more accurate. Ryzen AI 300 is promising the best of both worlds, and any developer using 16-bit will automatically benefit from this.

There are other questions as well. AMD isn't disclosing total package TOPS like its competitors are. That's the total AI power that you'll get between the CPU, GPU, and NPU.

Moreover, the 50 TOPS promise strictly applies to the pair of Ryzen AI 9 chips being announced today. Given that AMD isn't committing to anything, it seems likely that the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 members of the family might have lesser NPUs, and if they're capable of less than 40 TOPS, those SKUs won't qualify for Copilot+.

Notably, Copilot+ won't be available for these chips at launch, since it's currently optimized for Qualcomm Snapdragon. The same will be true of Intel's Lunar Lake when that launches later this year.

Say goodbye to suffixes

U-series? You wish

AMD is ditching more than its old branding. You're not going to see as many suffixes like U and H at the end of chip names. These new chips will scale from 15W to 54W, depending on how the OEM chooses to implement it.

These are the two Ryzen AI 9 chips being announced today:

AMD says that products using Ryzen AI 300 chips will start shipping in July. It should be a pretty limited launch, and the company didn't hint at any timelines for the rest of the product family.