AMD is one of the world’s biggest computer chip companies, best known for its fierce competition with Intel. It’s a rivalry that really kicked off in the early 2000s when AMD’s Athlon and Opteron processors saw great success. While AMD has often struggled to keep up with Intel, its latest Ryzen CPUs are some of the most competitive chips it has produced in years. AMD also acquired ATI in 2006, a 3D graphics card company. It now produces a variety of Radeon GPUs that compete with Nvidia’s GeForce line of graphics cards. AMD also produces the chips found in the latest PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and the Valve Steam Deck, and it re-entered the server market with its Epyc brand in 2017.
If you’ve got one of the Microsoft/Asus collab handhelds, let me know if this is game-changing? You can find the update in Command Center > Armory Crate SE > Update Center > Preview Updates. Asus does warn “it may still contain bugs or instability, designed for those who can’t live without the latest and greatest.”
Tomorrow’s event will announce more than $1 billion in commitments for the Trump admin’s “Genesis Project” AI push and investments from the NSF and Energy Department, reports Axios, including $100 million in credits from something called National Compute.
Meanwhile, Fox News and Bloomberg report Trump will award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and Lisa Su, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella are in line for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. It’s the first time Trump has ever given out the awards, which usually don’t go to well-known tech execs, judging by previous recipients.
“We’ve been able to increase our supply as we’ve gone through 2026,” CEO Lisa Su said today, “and we’re going to substantially increase our supply in 2027.”
Like Nvidia, AMD has seen a boom in GPU demand driven by AI, signing big deals with Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, and suffering the same shortages as the rest of the industry.
If you want to know where the power in tech currently lies, you only need to look at this photo of the head table at Donald Trump’s state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. I see Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su, Apple’s Tim Cook, and SpaceXaiTesla’s Elon Musk seated by the leaders of the world’s two superpowers. The CEOs and / or founders of Alphabet (Google), OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Qualcomm, Micron, Dell, and… Zoom, were also in attendance.
The price increase reportedly follows higher prices from chip manufacturer TSMC, and could impact everything from AMD’s GPUs to its motherboard chipsets. Intel is reportedly planning a similar price hike, and Qualcomm and Nvidia also raised prices earlier this year.
ETA PRIME tries to answer that question (while we’re revisiting our initial rating) with some benchmarking courtesy of the Windows drivers Valve released earlier this month. As Videocardz points out, on this unit with 64GB of RAM, the results were pretty close across the three games tested, with SteamOS winning in 1080p across Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Horizon Zero Dawn, but Windows moving a couple of frames per second ahead at 4K rendering.
Moore’s Law is Dead claimed Sony’s handheld PS6 would add Zen 6 LP (Low Power) cores, and Phoronix has found new evidence in a Linux kernel patch: “a Low Power core type, in addition to the existing Performance and Efficiency types.” They’re “designed for minimal power consumption during background or idle workloads,” not necessarily gaming on battery.
“Gorgon Halo” is the successor to the Strix Halo that powered unprecedented mini-PC, tablet, and gaming handheld designs last year. Now with even more RAM for AI, coming Q3. Yes, that’s going to cost in this economy. Meanwhile, AMD’s own mini-PC with Strix Halo will open pre-orders in June for $3,999, exclusively at Micro Center.
Data center sales are now “the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth,” according to CEO Lisa Su. AI agents are increasing demands for CPUs, and AMD and Intel’s x86 industry group recently announced a new instruction set, AI Compute Extensions (ACE), to help close the performance gap with GPUs.
Its client and gaming revenue grew 23 percent to $3.6 billion despite lower “semi-custom revenue” for devices like game consoles.
[Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.]
Yesterday we found out the price of the new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, the real name of a real product that I guess buyers are expected to learn.
jakobsturm:
Great name!
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If you want one of the best AMD desktop processors for gaming, development, and creation then it’s going to set you back $899. That’s the price of AMD’s new Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, which is releasing on April 22nd. It has 16 cores, 208MB of total cache, and both chiplets have AMD’s 3D V-Cache. AMD is promising 5–10 percent performance gains over the 9950X3D in DaVinci Resolve and Blender.
The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is a follow-up to last year’s excellent gaming chip, with 16 Zen 5 cores and 208MB of total cachem with the V-Cache split across both chiplets.
However, its upgrades may not do much for gaming alone, with the company’s pitch instead highlighting a 5 - 10 percent performance bump in creative apps like DaVinci Resolve, positioning it as a compromise option between Threadripper CPUs and options like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.
Lenovo’s 15-inch Legion 7A is its first with an AMD Strix Halo APU. The 7A will charge via 180W USB-C and be configurable with a gaming-focused Ryzen AI Max Plus 392.
It launches in July from $2,299, competing with Asus’ upcoming TUF Gaming A14. Remember, integrated graphics are good now.
After buying millions of Nvidia’s AI chips last week, Meta has now also signed a multi-year agreement to buy six gigawatts worth of AMD processors for AI data centers. The deal could see Meta owning 10 percent of AMD’s stock, and follows a similar agreement between AMD and OpenAI.
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Verge Score
This pricey laptop has got sleek no-frills looks and Strix Halo strengths on lock.
If you’re wondering what kind of access a gold-and-Gorilla-Glass statue, a $1 million donation, and endless fawning buys you, well, it gets a special advanced screening of a state-sanctioned propaganda documentary film about the First Lady. Okay, it buys more than that, this is just a nice bonus.
The 25 percent tariff announced on Wednesday only applies to chips imported into the US then exported to other countries, as the New York Times reports. While it won’t apply to chips imported for use in the US, it will let the government collect some of the earnings from sales of AI chips to China.
[The New York Times]
Here it is next to the Framework Desktop and Corsair’s AI Workstation 300, each of which are plenty small on their own (4.5 liters)! Nvidia’s Spark, already on sale, might be slightly smaller? I saw one earlier but don’t have it to compare. AMD’s Halo is coming Q2 2026, no price yet.
The AMD Ryzen AI Halo is built with Ryzen AI Max Plus series processors and is “capable of running up to 200 billion parameter models locally,” AMD says. It’s “planned for introduction” in the second quarter of 2026, with information about pricing and commercial availability to be shared “closer to launch.”
