You don't need a Snapdragon PC if you want Microsoft's fancy AI features

Microsoft’s Copilot Plus AI features are only available on laptops powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors. That’s changing today, though, as AMD has announced its new Strix Point laptop chips in Taipei at Computex, supporting Copilot Plus.

The biggest addition to these Ryzen AI 300 Series processors is a new NPU for improved AI performance. AMD claims that this NPU tops out at 50 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), with the company saying this beats processors like the Snapdragon X Elite and Apple M4.

Interestingly, AMD claimed that this is the first “block floating point” NPU. The company suggested that this allows for good AI performance without quantization, which is a common technique used to effectively compress on-device AI models (particularly on smartphones).

Either way, the introduction of Copilot Plus support on AMD’s latest chips means that you don’t need to buy a Snapdragon PC if you want AI features on a Windows laptop. That’s good news, particularly for gamers or people who simply aren’t ready to leap from x64 to Arm-based machines.

In addition to all the AI goodness, the Ryzen AI 300 processors can feature up to 12 high-performance “Zen 5” cores and come with built-in AMD Radeon 800M graphics. AMD is also claiming amazing power efficiency with ultra-long battery life.

The AMD Ryzen AI 300 series includes the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with the 16-core AMD Radeon 890M, 12 CPU cores, 24 threads, a base clock speed of 2GHz, and a max boost clock of up to 5.1GHz and a default TDP of 28W. The next option comes in the form of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 that comes with the 12-core AMD Radeon 880M, 10 CPU cores, 20 threads, a base clock speed of 2GHz, and a max boost clock of up to 5.1GHz and a default TDP of 28W.

AMD confirmed that the first laptops with the Strix Point Ryzen processors will launch next month. ASUS, HP, and Lenovo are all confirmed to offer devices.