At CES 2025, AMD’s Joe Macri praised Apple for proving that people will buy powerful computers without discrete GPUs.
Chips AMD Ryzen AI Max were an interesting announcement at CES 2025. These are essentially super-powerful versions of processors with up to 16 CPU cores and 50 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, as well as up to 128 GB of integrated RAM. AMD claims that Ryzen AI Max chips will provide up to 2.6 times faster 3D rendering than Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, as well as 1.4 times better graphics performance.
If you look closely, you might think that AMD was a bit inspired by Apple Silicon chips with their powerful CPU cores, GPUs, and shared memory. But, according to Vice President Joe Macri, AMD was moving toward this long before Apple.
«We were building APUs [chips that combine Radeon processors and graphics] while Apple was using discrete GPUs. They were using our discrete GPUs. So I don’t give Apple credit for coming up with this idea».
AMD has also had experience integrating huge amounts of memory into its Instinct GPUs for data centers.
Still, Macri credits Apple with proving that it doesn’t need discrete graphics to sell people powerful computers.
«A lot of people in the PC industry said that if you need graphics, it has to be discrete graphics, because otherwise people will think it’s bad graphics,» he said. «Apple has shown that consumers don’t care what’s inside the box. They actually care about how the box looks. They care about the screen, the keyboard, the mouse. They care about what it does».
With the success of Apple Silicon, Macri was finally able to get approval to spend a «staggering» amount of money on the development of Ryzen AI Max.
«I always knew, because we were building APUs, and I always pushed for this big APU, that I could build a system that was smaller, faster, and I could deliver much higher performance with the same power,» he said.
Engadget journalists tested the new tablet ASUS ROG Flow Z13 at the AMD booth at CES 2025. We managed to play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart in 1080p resolution with a frame rate well above 60, with a bunch of graphical embellishments. It was hard to tell on such a small tablet screen, but the overall performance looked on par with a basic PlayStation 5 (albeit with a slightly lower resolution). AMD claims that the Ryzen AI Max is also comparable to Apple’s 14-core M4 Pro chip (which it also outperforms in the Vray test).
Systems based on Ryzen AI Max will be available in the first and second quarters of 2025.
Source: Engadget
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: