In Response To Intel-Nvidia Deal, AMD Executive Says Road Map Will Remain ‘Disruptive’

In an interview with CRN, AMD executive Jason Banta explains how AMD is seeing ‘great success’ with commercial PCs and says the company is ‘very confident’ about its road map in response to the new Intel-Nvidia deal and Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X2 chips.

With Intel recently striking a deal with Nvidia to co-develop products for PCs and data centers, an AMD executive told CRN that his company is “very confident” about its ability to compete with the two rivals and pointed to one new product as an example.

“We’re very confident in our road map. We’ve done some very exciting things. You’ve seen ‘Strix Halo’ products that are really category-defining products” said Jason Banta, corporate vice president and general manager of client OEM at AMD, last Friday.

Strix Halo is the code name for the Ryzen AI Max series that the company revealed in January as the “most advanced mobile x86 processor ever created.” The chip designer said at the time that the system-on-chip’s speedy CPU, GPU and NPU—along with its ability to allocate up to 96 GB of system memory for the GPU—allowed AMD to beat top chips from Intel, Apple and Nvidia in key areas such as 3-D rendering and AI inference.

“And so that’s how we think about our road map: We want to continue to provide disruptive technology,” said Banta, who works closely with OEMs for client computing needs.

When the Intel-Nvidia deal was announced in mid-September, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the PC product would be a “giant” system-on-chip that fuses custom Intel CPU and Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets to create a “new class of integrated graphics laptops that the world’s never seen before.” Huang added that the system-on-chip would allow Nvidia to enter a market that represents roughly 150 million laptop shipments every year.

Intel and Nvidia aren’t the only competitors AMD has to contend with right now. Last week, Qualcomm revealed its next-generation Snapdragon X2 Elite processors for Windows computers that will push NPU performance to 80 trillion operations per second (TOPS) and feature its new Snapdragon Guardian out-of-band PC management technology, signaling the rival’s plan to make a big push into the commercial PC market.

But Banta seemed unmoved by the announcement, saying that AMD is “very confident that we’re going to continue to be able to compete in that environment.”

“We’ve got great solutions going into notebook, desktop, handheld, other form factors, so we’re very confident in the ability to compete there,” he said.

A senior executive at distribution powerhouse D&H Distributing told CRN that rising competition in the semiconductor industry is leading vendors like AMD and Intel to become more aggressive in the channel with respect to things like competitive bidding and demo units.

“I think you’re seeing the CPU folks getting more aggressive, not only with distribution but also with the reseller community as well, which is good for all of us,” said Greg King, vice president of vendor management at D&H Distributing, on Thursday.

How AMD Is Seeing ‘Great Success’ In The Commercial PC Market

Banta said AMD has seen “great success” in the commercial PC market with its Ryzen Pro and Ryzen AI Pro products, whose out-of-band PC management technology can integrate with mainstream management tools.

“We've really embraced a lot of those modern manageability standards, capabilities like [Microsoft’s] Autopilot [and] Intune,” he said.

AMD saw its revenue in the commercial PC market grow in the first half of the year compared with the same period last year, according to Banta. This tracks with figures AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su touted in the company’s two most recent earnings calls, with Ryzen Pro PC sell-through growing 30 percent year over year in the first quarter and sales to OEMs for commercial PCs increasing 25 percent year over year in the second quarter.

“A lot of what drove that is that people were able to successfully deploy and expand fleets based on Ryzen Pro and Ryzen AI Pro,” Banta said.

The executive also cited the company’s Ryzen Pro enterprise security features as well as the support AMD provides to customers deploying Ryzen-powered PC fleets.

“As users deploy or they migrate from a competitive solution, we’re there to support them. We interact directly with customers where they need support,” he said.

Another strength Banta cited for AMD’s commercial PC efforts is the expanded availability of OEM designs using its processors. The company got a big boost at the beginning of the year when it announced its first commercial PC deal for Ryzen with Dell Technologies, which had long relied on Intel CPUs for the segment.

As of January, the company expected its Ryzen AI processors, including the Ryzen AI Pro chips, to go into more than 150 consumer and commercial PC designs this year.

“One of the big things that a lot of channel partners and customers are seeing is a significant step forward in availability of the portfolio,” he said.

The result is that customers are increasingly finding more options for Ryzen-powered PCs that have familiar designs and desired specifications in addition to coming from OEMs they normally work with, according to Banta.

“What we’re finding is they can migrate from a competitive solution to AMD, see better performance, see better battery life, see those benefits and get all of the screen sizes, form factors, different levels of support that they want,” he said.

This has allowed AMD to tout the “largest portfolio” of commercial Copilot+ PCs, the umbrella of client devices with exclusive, on-device AI features from Microsoft. These features and others from third parties are supported by an NPU with at least 40 TOPS.

“Those folks that want to move to an AI PC, they want a Copilot+ device, they have more options available with AMD in those cases,” Banta said.