AMD Wants to Compete With Apple's M Max-Series Chips

We heard a few weeks ago that AMD was planning to back off from the GPU market. Its larger strategy might also include taking aim at Apple and its increasingly-better Apple silicon, with a new range of "Max" CPUs.

AMD is reportedly gearing up to challenge Apple's dominance in the high-end laptop market with a new line of powerful mobile CPUs, codenamed Strix Halo and now rumored to be called Ryzen AI Max. This new family will sit above AMD's mainstream Ryzen AI 9 chips and target true mobile workstations, offering significantly more graphical power than existing AMD mobile chips.

The leaked specs suggest that Ryzen AI Max will feature up to 16 cores and a whopping 40 compute units (CUs) in its embedded GPU, more than twice what AMD's current top mobile offering, the Radeon 890M, provides. This aligns with Apple's strategy of increasing GPU power as you move up its product stack to cater to video editing and other demanding workloads. Ryzen AI Max chips could also support up to 96GB of video memory, double what Apple's Max CPUs offer. Ryzen CPUs are among the best you can get on laptops right now, and the point of this improved iGPU is to make its chips more attractive to people that are considering something like a MacBook Pro but who might not want a big and heavy laptop with a full-size dedicated GPU.

If what we're looking at here ends up being true, Ryzen AI Max family is expected to include three configurations, with 16, 12, and 8-core CPU options and iGPUs offering 40 CUs for the top two chips and 32 CUs for the third. This positions AMD's creme-de-la-creme Ryzen AI Max CPU directly against Apple's M3 Max, which also features 16 cores and 40 CUs.

Of course, there's also the very important difference of Apple's silicon being ARM while AMD's Ryzen chips are x86. We'd need to see how power-hungry these chips are once they are released.

Source: ExtremeTech