Ryzen AM5 APUs

The Ryzen AI feature of "Phoenix" is confined to a limited market-segment (thin and light notebooks). Any plans to bring it to other form-factors?
When you listen to Lisa Su talk about AI, she talks about it as pervasive AI that will be everywhere. That will take time to get there. I think that what you're certainly seeing right now from us and from our competitors in the silicon space. You see AI as being attached to the premium end of systems today, and I think that will trickle down over time. Ultimately AI will infiltrate every part of our product roadmap as well as the competition's. I think the biggest thing that we must think about is that for us to make this investment in silicon, the benefit in the user experience has to be there. The software ecosystem has to be there, the applications have to be there, and users have to see it as valuable such that they want that capability as part of their system. It's not going to be an acceptable trade-off to take capability away from a processor in order to afford fitting an inference engine into it. I think that inference engine has to bring more capability and more experience there.


AMD's Phoenix APU

Currently shipping AM5 CPUs come with integrated graphics, what does that mean for APUs in the AM5 space, and how could "Phoenix" bring a meaningful value proposition to AM5?
As the Ryzen Desktop Guy I think about that question a lot. You know even in our AM4 portfolio there are very different customers who buy a 5600G vs a 5600X. There's a class of buyers who wants to build SFF desktops, that wants to do things like APU based gaming. I think there will be a set of people where a Phoenix-based desktop APU would be very attractive for them, with RDNA 3 graphics and Zen 4 CPU cores. I think there will be some people that will want that.


How AMD positioned the Ryzen 5700G APU for AM4 in the past

But is that group big enough so that it makes sense to launch such a product?
I guess I would say it differently. If you look across the entire desktop portfolio, not just DIY but also OEM desktop systems and system builders. I think that in many cases when you get outside of the gaming use case and you look more at professional use of desktops in an office environment. The ability to do professional work with a more powerful graphics engine is something that some business tenders look for when they are doing large desktop deployments. I think there will be a space for that. I think that your premise that APUs will not take over AM5 is probably right on. There will be some APUs that come into AM5 and there will be some users that want it and look for it, but it won't be all of them. I have a 65 W Raphael desktop system that I use at work with three displays hooked up to it and it is awesome. In a SFF case it's a phenomenal work desktop system. But not everybody has to agree with me. If there's some people that want a Phoenix based APU desktop, that's ok, we'll support these people, too.

AM5 APU Delays

It seems that Phoenix is lagging a bit behind schedule? Could you comment on the challenges you're encountering during the rollout?
We're seeing our first Phoenix notebooks coming to market now. I think in our demo room we have a Razer system, an HP system that are both coming out. I think the reality is that it's very true that with Phoenix we targeted specifically the premium consumer space. Those are very high-touch platforms and the bar for what experience those OEMs want to deliver with those systems has led to a longer development time than even we anticipated on some of those platforms. We're very happy to see some of them hitting the market now, but when it comes to getting into some of those really high-end premium consumer systems, making sure that that experience is right over being fast in time to market is certainly the priority. We've been aligned with our OEM customers on that prioritization. You'll be seeing a rapid rollout of a number of systems. You'll start to see that very quickly.

Was it more software or hardware that made things challenging?
You know a lot of it is the tuning of all those things together. With Phoenix one of the innovations that came into the platform is something that we call our power management framework or "PMF." It's beyond the SMU, which does processor-level control, but what we really worked on in the Phoenix generation is an extension of the concept of the SMU to the system-level. More OS interaction, more hints between the OS and the processor to make sure that we are running at the right power level. Many of these premium systems, what our customers are looking for is silent computing. If you are doing things like Office applications or Teams or web browsing, you don't want the fan to ever turn on. You want it to be absolutely silent. Many applications aren't written in way where the processor can easily understand what the real-time demand is for what the user is trying to do. So we built this framework in tying together operating system, user intent and SMU behavior to really achieve that vision of silent computing on many of these systems. That interaction has been one of those things that we have been working on most.