Trending Articles
Trending Topics
Trending
One of the great benefits of attending a global tech event such as IFA in Berlin is that you get a chance to talk to the top brass from global companies. Companies such as AMD, and top brass such as Jack Huynh, who is the General Manager of its Computing and Graphics Group. I was fortunate enough to attend a breakfast briefing where he shared his thoughts on AI PCs.
“I still think we’re in the early innings of AI PC, and there’s still many, many innings left to play,” he said. Drawing a parallel with Apple, which launched the iPhone in 2007 but didn’t offer a mature software ecosystem until 20 months later, he suggested that AI PCs are on the same journey.
But, in his mind, that doesn’t translate into uncertainty about the destination. “Humans love more intelligence, right? And we’ve seen the AI PC’s [intelligence] progress dramatically. Even 12, 15 months ago, we thought text to image was a big deal. Now, you’re actually seeing text to video – not just text to video, text to video with voice synced.”
At the moment, such power is confined to cloud-based services and the data centres they call upon. But AMD recently announced that you could run extremely powerful AI models locally on a Ryzen-powered PC, albeit the company’s top chip.
Huynh believes that, as the PCs’ capability grows, there will be a shift to local AI due to one fundamental reason: privacy.
“I’m actually a very private person, a super private person. So for me, security, privacy is very critical,” he said. “I even have a home server that I don’t want any data to leave the premise. So when I think about the AI PC, the capability we’re putting into our roadmap, we’re betting on it.”
Although that’s open to interpretation, I believe the “it” Huynh refers to is the ability to run extremely powerful AI services locally – including text to video.
He was quick to add that doesn’t mean AMD will ignore its traditional strengths of CPU performance or GPU power. “The way I think about our strategy is we first want to build a great PC, a better PC, maybe the perfect PC, and then we’ll add the best AI capability, future proof, so you get the best of both worlds, right? So it’s a no- compromise strategy: great productivity, great performance, great battery life.”
Finally, let’s talk hype. Many people reading this may believe that AI has been overhyped, but Huynh disagrees: “I personally think it’s undervalued, because I’m looking at the development [of AI] over the next three to five years.”
That’s an interesting statement, suggesting that he has a vision based upon the horsepower built into future NPUs – the ones that will be built into the processors of 2028, 2029 and 2030. Not to mention conversations that AMD will surely be having with software developers about what they can do with such silicon.
“The progress is exponential,” he said, pointing to the rise of text to video. He sees the same potential growth in agentic AI, where you devolve power to AI agents so they can make decisions on your behalf.
Right now they’re basic and need guidance, but Huynh believes we will soon have AI agents of a similar level to “graduate students” to delegate your work to.
“When I’m working with development, I’m looking at the next three to five years, not the next three to six months,” he concluded. “We’re working on things that haven’t been thought about. We’re laying the train tracks as the train is moving.”
