Next year will likely be the first year of the AI PC, and chipmakers are racing to be the ones powering it. This week, AMD launched its Ryzen 8040 series of mobile CPUs alongside new Instinct hardware for the datacenter. AMD explained it all in a special episode of The Full Nerd podcast. First up: Jason Banta, AMD's client CPU chief, who spoke to Adam Patrick Murray and myself about the Ryzen 8000 series of mobile chips and how they'll enable local chatbot and AI-powered features. Pay attention to the release of the Ryzen AI Software, which "quantizes" a ChatGPT-esque large language model AI into a format that can be used on a Ryzen CPU.

AMD's powerhouse Threadripper chips are back for desktop PCs! Despite declaring the end of consumer Threadripper chips last generation, AMD announced three new Ryzen Threadripper 7000-series chips on Thursday, with up to 64 cores and 128 threads -- and the option of installing a "Pro"-class Threadripper 700 WX series for a massive 96 cores and 192 threads, too. Take a deep breath, though. The underlying message is the same as when AMD released the Threadripper 3970X back in 2019: these chips are for those who live and breathe video editing and content creation, and are optimized for such. Nevertheless, they almost certainly represent the most powerful CPU you can buy on a desktop, and they'll cost a ton.