Acer unveiled a pair of AMD Ryzen 8040 series laptops on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, given their chips' dedicated neural processing units (NPU), the company is marketing the 2024 Acer Swift Edge 16 and Swift Go 14 as AI workhorses. The Windows 11 machines support OLED displays, Radeon 780M graphics and 32GB of RAM. The Ryzen 8040 chip series, revealed in December, has a dedicated AI Engine that AMD claims makes it up to 1.4 times faster than its predecessors in Llama 2 and AI vision model performance. Acer says the Swift Edge 16 and Swift Go 14 will deploy the NPU for AI-related tasks like PurifiedVoice (remove background noise in calls and recordings) and PurifiedView (blurring backgrounds in images and correcting your eyes' positioning on video calls).

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AMD announced the Ryzen 8040 series of laptop processors at the company's AI-themed event, reframing what has been a conversation about CPU speed, power, and battery life into one that prioritizes AI. In January, AMD launched the Ryzen 7000 family, of which the Ryzen 7040 included the first use of what AMD then called its XDNA architecture, powering Ryzen AI. (When rival Intel disclosed its Meteor Lake processor this past summer, Intel began referring to the AI accelerator as an NPU, and the name stuck.) More than 50 laptop models already ship with Ryzen AI, executives said. In AMD's case, the XDNA NPU assists the Zen CPU, with the Radeon RDNA architecture of the GPU powering graphics. But all three logic components work harmoniously, contributing to the greater whole.

Last January, AMD beat out Intel by launching its Ryzen 7040 chips, the first x86 processors to integrate a neural processing unit (NPU) for AI workloads. Intel's long-delayed Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" chips, its first to integrate an NPU, are set to arrive on December 14th. But it seems AMD can't help but remind Intel it's lagging behind: Today, AMD is announcing the Ryzen 8040 series chips, its next batch of AI-equipped laptop hardware, and it's also giving us a peak into its future AI roadmap. The Ryzen 8040 chips, spearheaded by the 8-core Ryzen 9 8945HS, are up to 1.4 times faster than its predecessors when its comes to Llama 2 and AI vision model performance, according to AMD. They're also reportedly up to 1.8 times faster than Intel's high-end 13900H chip when it comes to gaming, and 1.4 times faster for content creation.