CPUs

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Intel’s next-generation Panther Lake laptop chips could be a return to form

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Intel says that systems with these chips in them should be shipping by the end of the year. In recent years, the company has launched a small handful of ultraportable-focused CPUs at the end of the year, and then followed that up with a more fully fleshed-out midrange and high-end lineup at CES in January—we’d expect Intel to stick to that basic approach here.

Panther Lake draws near

Panther Lake tries to combine different aspects of the last-generation Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake chips. Intel

Intel’s first Core Ultra chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, were introduced two years ago. There were three big changes that separated these from the 14th-generation Core CPUs and their predecessors: They were constructed of multiple silicon tiles, fused together into one with Intel’s Foveros packaging technologies; some of those tiles were manufactured by TSMC rather than Intel; and they added a neural processing unit (NPU) that could be used for on-device machine learning and generative AI applications.

The second-generation Core Ultra chips continued to do all three of those things, but Intel pursued an odd bifurcated strategy that gave different Core Ultra 200-series processors significantly different capabilities.

The most interesting models, codenamed Lunar Lake (aka Core Ultra 200V), integrated the system RAM on the CPU package, which improved performance and power consumption while making them more expensive to buy and complicated to manufacture. These chips included Intel’s most up-to-date Arc GPU architecture, codenamed Battlemage, plus an NPU that met the performance requirements for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative.

But Core Ultra 200V chips were mostly used in high-end thin-and-light laptops. Lower-cost and higher-performance laptops got the other kind of Core Ultra 200 chip, codenamed Arrow Lake, which was a mishmash of old and new. The CPU cores used the same architecture as Lunar Lake, and there were usually more of them. But the GPU architecture was older and slower, and the NPU didn’t meet the requirements for Copilot+. If Lunar Lake was all-new, Arrow Lake was mostly an updated CPU design fused to a tweaked version of the original Meteor Lake design (confused by all these lakes yet? Welcome to my world).

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AMD’s new laptop CPU lineup is a mix of new silicon and new names for old silicon

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AMD’s CES announcements include a tease about next-gen graphics cards, a new flagship desktop CPU, and a modest refresh of its processors for handheld gaming PCs. But the company’s largest announcement, by volume, is about laptop processors.

Today the company is expanding the Ryzen AI 300 lineup with a batch of updated high-end chips with up to 16 CPU cores and some midrange options for cheaper Copilot+ PCs. AMD has repackaged some of its high-end desktop chips for gaming laptops, including the first Ryzen laptop CPU with 3D V-Cache enabled. And there’s also a new-in-name-only Ryzen 200 series, another repackaging of familiar silicon to address lower-budget laptops.

Ryzen AI 300 is back, along with high-end Max and Max+ versions

Ryzen AI is back, with Max and Max+ versions that include huge integrated GPUs. Credit: AMD

We came away largely impressed by the initial Ryzen AI 300 processors in August 2024, and new processors being announced today expand the lineup upward and downward.

AMD is announcing the Ryzen AI 7 350 and Ryzen AI 5 340 today, along with identically specced Pro versions of the same chips with a handful of extra features for large businesses and other organizations.

Midrange Ryzen AI processors should expand Copilot+ features into somewhat cheaper x86 PCs.

Credit: AMD

The 350 includes eight CPU cores split evenly between large Zen 5 cores and smaller, slower but more efficient Zen 5C cores, plus a Radeon 860M with eight integrated graphics cores (down from a peak of 16 for the Ryzen AI 9). The 340 has six CPU cores, again split evenly between Zen 5 and Zen 5C, and a Radeon 840M with four graphics cores. But both have the same 50 TOPS NPUs as the higher-end Ryzen AI chips, qualifying both for the Copilot+ label.

For consumers, AMD is launching three high-end chips across the new “Ryzen AI Max+” and “Ryzen AI Max” families. Compared to the existing Strix Point-based Ryzen AI processors, Ryzen AI Max+ and Max include more CPU cores, and all of their cores are higher-performing Zen 5 cores, with no Zen 5C cores mixed in. The integrated graphics also get significantly more powerful, with as many as 40 cores built in—these chips seem to be destined for larger thin-and-light systems that could benefit from more power but don’t want to make room for a dedicated GPU.

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AMD launches new Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs for PCs that play games and work hard

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AMD’s batch of CES announcements this year includes just two new products for desktop PC users: the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D. Both will be available at some point in the first quarter of 2025.

Both processors include additional CPU cores compared to the 9800X3D that launched in November. The 9900X3D includes 12 Zen 5 CPU cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.5 GHz, and the 9950X3D includes 16 cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.7 GHz. Both include 64MB of extra L3 cache compared to the regular 9900X and 9950X, for a total cache of 144MB and 140MB, respectively; games in particular tend to benefit disproportionately from this extra cache memory.

But the 9950X3D and 9900X3D aren’t being targeted at people who build PCs primarily to game—the company says their game performance is usually within 1 percent of the 9800X3D. These processors are for people who want peak game performance when they’re playing something but also need lots of CPU cores for chewing on CPU-heavy workloads during the workday.

AMD estimates that the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is about 8 percent faster than the 7950X3D when playing games and about 13 percent faster in professional content creation apps. These modest gains are more or less in line with the small performance bump we’ve seen in other Ryzen 9000-series desktop CPUs.

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Amazon ready to use its own AI chips, reduce its dependence on Nvidia

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Amazon now expects around $75 billion in capital spending in 2024, with the majority on technology infrastructure. On the company’s latest earnings call, chief executive Andy Jassy said he expects the company will spend even more in 2025.

This represents a surge on 2023, when it spent $48.4 billion for the whole year. The biggest cloud providers, including Microsoft and Google, are all engaged in an AI spending spree that shows little sign of abating.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are all big customers of Nvidia, but are also designing their own data center chips to lay the foundations for what they hope will be a wave of AI growth.

“Every one of the big cloud providers is feverishly moving towards a more verticalized and, if possible, homogenized and integrated [chip technology] stack,” said Daniel Newman at The Futurum Group.

“Everybody from OpenAI to Apple is looking to build their own chips,” noted Newman, as they seek “lower production cost, higher margins, greater availability, and more control.”

“It’s not [just] about the chip, it’s about the full system,” said Rami Sinno, Annapurna’s director of engineering and a veteran of SoftBank’s Arm and Intel.

For Amazon’s AI infrastructure, that means building everything from the ground up, from the silicon wafer to the server racks they fit into, all of it underpinned by Amazon’s proprietary software and architecture. “It’s really hard to do what we do at scale. Not too many companies can,” said Sinno.

After starting out building a security chip for AWS called Nitro, Annapurna has since developed several generations of Graviton, its Arm-based central processing units that provide a low-power alternative to the traditional server workhorses provided by Intel or AMD.

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