AMD ( AMD ) debuted its latest artificial intelligence chips during its Advancing AI 2024 event in San Francisco, California, on Thursday.
The flurry of announcements comes as AMD continues to battle AI market leader Nvidia ( NVDA ) and looks to take more market share from longtime rival Intel ( INTC ) in the server CPU space.
The company showcased its new 5th generation AMD EPYC central processing units (CPUs) for servers, detailed its Instinct MI325X AI accelerator, and showed off its Ryzen AI PRO 300 processors for AI PCs for enterprise customers.
Shares of AMD fell more than 4% in afternoon trading.
AMD claimed that its top-of-the-line 5th generation EPYC 9965 chips, which cost $14,813, beat Intel’s fifth generation Xeon server chips — with servers running AMD’s processors offering 4x faster video transcoding times; 3.9x improvements in time to insight, the time it takes to turn data into actionable information for science and high-performance computing applications; and 1.6x performance per core of virtualized infrastructure.
In other words: AMD wants you to know that its chip can outperform Intel’s in certain scenarios.
Intel debuted its next-generation Xeon 6 chip in September, but AMD says it hasn’t been able to get its hands on the processor to test it against its EPYC chip.
On the AI ​​accelerator side, AMD offered more details about its MI325X chip. The company says the data center processor beats Nvidia’s popular H200 AI chip when it comes to memory bandwidth and capacity, with the MI325X providing 256GB of HBM3E, a type of high-bandwidth memory used in AI processors.
AMD said the MI325X has 1.8x higher memory capacity than Nvidia’s H200 and 1.3x more bandwidth. According to the chip maker, companies including Dell ( DELL ), Eviden, Gigabyte, HPE ( HPE ), Lenovo ( LNVGF ), and Super Micro Computer ( SMCI ) will begin offering MI325-based platforms in the first quarter of 2025.
The company also said it is preparing its MI350X, the follow-up to the MI325X, which will debut in the second half of next year. Nvidia, meanwhile, is working with customers to deploy its next-generation Blackwell-based AI servers.
The data center has become the new battleground for AMD, Nvidia and Intel as the companies look to take advantage of the ongoing AI gold rush and grab as many customers as possible.
And that translates into some big bucks for AMD and Nvidia. In its most recent quarter, AMD reported record data center sales of $2.8 billion, up 115% year over year. Still, that’s a far cry from Nvidia’s Data Center business, which reported revenue of $26.3 billion, up 154% year over year.
Intel, on the other hand, is struggling with a massive turnaround effort as it looks to regain its footing in the data center. In its most recent quarter, the company reported that its data center revenue fell 3% year over year, falling to $3 billion. The decline is part of a broader trend for Intel, which saw its full-year 2023 data center revenue fall a staggering 20% ​​compared to 2022.
In addition to its data center offerings, AMD showed off its new Ryzen AI PRO 300 processors for business PCs. The company says its high-end version of the PRO 300, the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375, gets 40% better performance and 14% faster productivity performance than Intel’s Core Ultra 7 165U chip.
But the 165U is one of Intel’s first-generation Core Ultra processors, and the company has already announced its second-generation Core Ultra chips, which Intel says offer both better performance and battery life than its first-generation offerings.
Both AMD and Intel are chasing hopes that AI PCs will jump-start PC sales as businesses and commercial customers look to replace the aging PCs they bought at the start of the pandemic. So far, however, these efforts have not borne much fruit.
According to Gartner, PC shipments fell in the third quarter despite the hype surrounding AI PCs. Still, with the holiday season around the corner, there’s plenty of opportunity for businesses to tell consumers about the benefits of AI PCs. Whether customers will listen is another story.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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