AMD teases CPUs with Xilinx AI engines for 2023

AMD plans to introduce processors next year that integrate AI engines from the company's recently acquired Xilinx FPGA business unit, which helped the chip designer deliver high sales growth in the first quarter along with the company's traditional PC and server businesses. CEO Lisa Su disclosed the plans for new AI-fueled CPUs during her company's first-quarter earnings call Tuesday, where she said the resulting microprocessors will "enable industry-leading inference capabilities" as part of broader plans to capitalize on AMD's $49 billion Xilinx acquisition. The AI engines are already being used in Xilinx's FPGA-based products for embedded and edge applications, including image recognition for cars, according to Victor Peng, Xilinx's former CEO who now leads AMD's Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group. Peng said AMD is working on developing "unified" software that will help developers take advantage of the new AI capabilities for both inference and training in datacenters and at the edge. Overall, Su said, Xilinx will allow AMD to have a "much broader set of offerings" in the AI hardware space that goes beyond the company's current capabilities with CPUs and GPUs.