Trending Articles
Trending Topics
Trending
At CES 2025, I sat down to interview Rahul Tikoo, General Manager of AMD’s Client Business Unit. So, the person charged with getting as many AMD chips into commercial laptops and PCs as possible.
Safe to say it was an interesting conversation, and frankly one that I think anyone thinking of buying a commercial laptop in 2025 should read. It’s a little combative in places – you may think a couple of my questions border on rude – but that’s also where Rahul comes up with his most convincing answers.
It was a 25-minute interview, so I couldn’t cover everything. But you’ll discover much about AMD’s blossoming partnership with Dell, what Rahul thinks about Intel’s current CPU range and ways to keep your business’s estate of laptops more secure.
Oh, and we also talk a lot about Intel vPro, including Rahul’s belief that the package is activated in as few as 5% of the laptops with vPro chips inside. Although he did adjust that figure to “low” later in the interview.
Tim Danton, TechFinitive: One piece of big news at CES 2025 is that Dell is producing commercial laptops with AMD inside – and I believe that’s the first time ever?
Rahul Tikoo, AMD: Yeah. I mean, it’s the first broad set of products that we’ve come to market with. We’ve had laptops with Dell in the SMB [small to medium-sized business] space before, but this portfolio is ten different products that will be launched in the commercial PC space across notebooks and desktops. You know, that’s a pretty broad portfolio, and with Dell being such a big commercial PC company and them betting on us, that’s a pretty big win and we’re very excited.
TD: I can see a smile on your face… you only left Dell as GM of its client PC business in June 2024, so is this something you’ve led the charge on?
RT: Well, of course. But companies don’t decide based on one person, right? Dell’s not going to bet the farm on, “hey, Rahul moved from Dell to AMD, we should start doing AMD business”. I think what we’ve been able to get across is the point of our leadership in the technology space. They’re seeing how the competitors are doing and what they’re struggling with, and they’re betting with what customers are going to want.
TD: Including battery life?
RT: Absolutely. Yesterday we launched the Kraken Point system [the AMD Ryzen AI Max that featured in our Best of CES 2025 roundup], and I said our battery life is going to be upwards of 24 hours of video playback, close to 10 hours of Teams. And so when you compare that to a Qualcomm or an Intel, that’s a multi-day battery life, right?
At Dell, many years ago, I launched products that had 26 hours of battery life, 28 hours of battery life. You can do that. You can put in a very large battery pack in a laptop, right? And you can have low power glass on a laptop, because the battery life is more than the CPU. You can do that, but then you have to ask yourself, what is the customer doing?
And when you think about commercial customers, here’s what they typically do. They want 11 to 12 hours of usable battery, like I’m doing my real work, it’s usable. But then when I go home, or when I’m in the office, many times between meetings, I’m connecting my laptop – in the office, it’s connected to a dock, which powers the laptop. At home, it might be connected to a home dock or it’s connected to power.
So effectively, whether you give them 24 hours of battery life or 27 hours of battery life, their experience is not going to change significantly, as long as I’m giving them really good daily use battery life of 11 to 12 hours of sustained workload.
That’s how we’re thinking about it: let’s have the best performance, let’s have the best design, look, feel and features. [Let’s have] OLED glass and a really, really cool thin and light design… and then within that framework, also give them really good, usable, full-day battery life and multi-day battery life, if they so desire, but have a more balanced design.
TD: And where does AI fit into this?
RT: Well, while you’re [getting all those benefits], you also, by the way, get AI so that you’re future proofed so that you can take advantage of all the experiences that Microsoft has and all of the experiences that are coming out from ISVs [such as Blackmagic and Adobe].
That’s the way we’ve been designing our product line. It’s been really first, let’s design great computers, and then they’re also AI capable. AI ready. They are, in fact, the best in terms of performance capabilities they have for AI.
TD: So, for commercial customers, if they buy AMD, is it going to be the same NPU? For example, above 40 TOPS so that they meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC criteria for features like Recall?
RT: No, not for every single one. Now, the way we’ve done the portfolio – because not everyone wants to pay for the value that 15 TOPS and above brings – so the way we have done our portfolio is at the high end of the portfolio, all the way to mainstream [include NPUs].
We start with Strix Halo [the Ryzen AI Max+ 395] which has large integrated graphics, 50+ TOPS NPU, 16 cores at the high end, a really big chip that meets the needs of high-end creators, high-end gamers, high-end developers. Below that is our Strix Point, which is our Ryzen AI 300 9 series products. They also have the 50 TOPS NPU, they also have many Zen 5 cores and all of that good stuff.
Below that is Kraken Point, which is our Ryzen AI 300 7 and Ryzen AI 300 5. Again, 50 TOPS NPU, really good performance, really good battery life. But that’s where our 50+ TOPS NPU stop.
There are people that want AI, but they don’t really want the 50+ TOPS. For them, what we have is Ryzen 200 and Ryzen 200 is our Zen 4 product, 16 TOPS, our last-gen GPU, but the great thing we’ve done is we put it in the same platform infrastructure. So FP8 is the platform infrastructure, which means an enterprise user can say, hey, I’m going to buy one platform.
TD: So why does a single platform matter?
RT: Well, in Dell’s case, they might say, I’m going to buy Dell Pro Plus. I’m going to put a Strix Point in it for my high-end knowledge workers or executives. I’m going to put a Kraken Point in it for my everyday knowledge workers or everyday workforce. And I’m going to put a Hawk Point, the Ryzen 200, for people that are more task workers, like in a call centre, because they don’t need the full AI capability. They need some AI capability for chat agents and things like that, which the Ryzen 200 can do.
And, oh, by the way, an end customer, Morgan Stanley or whoever, they don’t have to buy three different products. It’s that one Dell Pro Plus. They have a simple catalogue. In that simple catalogue, they can make the config choice that they want. And so that’s the power.
Now, if they go with Intel, if they want the high-end TOPS, they have to buy the Lunar Lake platforms, which, by the way, don’t have the lower end stuff. If you want the Meteor Lake, oh, it’s a different platform. Go to the Meteor Lake, that’s your 10, 11 TOPS platform. But in our case, we just put it all in one platform, infrastructure, one image – so IT management is simple. One design, so OEMs can easily design the product. So that, I think, is a very powerful thing for commercial users that we’re doing.
TD: You mentioned management ability, but yesterday saw the announcement that Intel vPro rollouts have been simplified. Is one of AMD’s priorities, one of your priorities, to get a similar level of trust in your equivalent AMD Ryzen Pro?
RT: Yes, it is. So let me first tell you, for all, manageability and security, we’re equal or better than vPro. Nowhere are we lacking, and our customers know that, because as they start having conversations on, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? Yes, and more.
But I’ll take a step back and give you my perspective on vPro first. You know what the vPro enablement rate is in the industry? 5%. So while Intel claims vPro is very important, right, the end customers are enabling it 5% of the time, meaning they’re effectively buying a product with vPro on it but not using it ever 95% of the time.
TD: Are you talking about companies? As in 5% of companies actually enable it, in which case it’ll be the bigger companies and that 5% figure – in terms of laptops being protected – jumps much higher?
RT: No. I’m talking about 5% of the entire install base. Now, let’s say I’m off by order of magnitude. So it’s 10%. But my point is still valid, which is 90% of the corporations are not using the vPro capabilities, right?
So, put that aside. What corporations really care about is, I have security from companies like CrowdStrike or Carbon Black, and that agentry requires to communicate with the CPU, with the BIOS, with the software. Can it do that? Yes, what companies care about is I have Splunk, I have Landesk [now ivanti], I have Microsoft Intune for manageability or SCCM. Can that connect with the AMD platform? Yes.
In the end, Intel has put a great marketing machinery around vPro and how important vPro is, but the reality is Ryzen Pro does all that and more. And companies can do exactly what they want to do in manageability or security of their products and deployment of their products that they can do on the other side.
And so I think that’s the way I look at it. You know, we work with corporations all the time, you know, we asked them to go run a pilot. When they run a pilot, they’re like, oh, wow, yeah, this thing just worked. So I was just worried that you guys didn’t have the same Pro thing.
So I think there might be a knowledge gap there that we have to bridge, right, but we don’t have a capability gap.
TD: What about your ease of deployment? Are you saying it’s as easy to deploy Ryzen Pro as it is vPro?
RT: Yes, it’s as easy, or easier to deploy. We in fact published a white paper several months ago, maybe even longer, that showed how much time we save in deployment versus the competition.
TD: But of course that may have changed now, after Intel’s announcement yesterday. You said that Intel’s deployment figures for vPro were 5% to 10%, but what is for AMD?
RT: For Intel, let’s just call it low. For AMD, the percentage, it’s probably the same, right? It’s probably still low. The meta point that I’m trying to make is capabilities matter – the title of vPro, Pro, doesn’t matter. We have the same capabilities. And you know, when we work with corporations and they look at our capabilities, they say, okay, great.
TD: But you sound like you’re kind of happy with it being low.
RT: I am not. I’m not. I think in the end, we have the capabilities. We want to drive the adoption of the capabilities that we have. I’m just making the point of vPro versus [Ryzen] Pro. If you keep the brand aside, do we want corporations to be able to deploy easily with our products? Absolutely. Can we? Yes. Do we want corporations to be extremely secure using our products? Absolutely. Can we, yes? Do we want corporations to be able to put out patches, BIOS updates, driver updates? Yes. Can we do that on AMD? Absolutely. We have all of the pieces. We work with all of the ecosystem partners. We make sure you know things work on our products.
I mean, we we have lots of large enterprises using AMD products in their enterprises for years.
TD: Let’s imagine a CIO at a company, maybe they think about rolling out Dell Pro with AMD for the first time. You’re sitting down with that CIO, and what are you saying? What are your compelling arguments?
RT: I think the first thing, if you’re a CIO, you want to know that you’re getting something for changing your install base, right? Hey, I’ve been on Intel. Why do I need to move to AMD?
I think my first argument would be because you’re getting so much more value. Look at the multithreaded performance and as a result of productivity gains that you’re going to get in your corporation. And if you think about a CIO, and you think about the IP that the knowledge workers are creating, if we can make them 30 to 40% faster, or we reduce their hiring by 5 to 10%, the amount of money we’re saving the corporation is pretty significant. So I think the first compelling argument is going to be the TCO of productivity. And so that’s number one.
The second would be, once you get them over that, they’re like, okay, we get it right – we get that this is good. And then it becomes about, how hard is it going to be to transition over, right? And then it becomes a conversation of, it’s not really going to be hard at all, because we have the same capabilities.
What do you use in your corporation? Do you use Carbon Black? Do you use McAfee? Do you use Splunk? Okay, well, those work, let’s go run a pilot. We help them with the pilot process, they realise that it’s pretty easy to move, then that’s a pretty simple conversation from that point.
But I think those are the two big things that they want to know about, right? Is, do I get value if I move? And then, is the move going to be easy?
TD: So let me twist it around and because what we’re seeing is that there’s more people power than there used to be in organisations. Employees choosing the laptops and PCs being bought for them, or at least having a say. So how do you convince them, employees, that you want AMD inside your next work laptop, as opposed to the competition?
RT: I don’t think people in a company choose what chip do I have in a box? What an end user is looking for is first and foremost an emotional choice: do I have a beautiful product that I’m proud to carry? Right? Does it look good? Does it feel good? Is it light to carry.
Second, does it perform flawlessly for whatever I’m trying to do? If you’re a marketing person and you’re trying to today create content, video content or audio content, or, you know, art using AI, or whatever other tools, does it work flawlessly? So I don’t have to worry about the technology. I just worry about what my job is, right? I think those will be the two biggest considerations.
They’re not really going to worry about what’s inside, unless you’re a very tech geeky person, which is possible. But then if you’re a tech geeky person, then you’ll get into the speeds and feeds, and if you get into the speeds and feeds, we will win all day long. So to me, I don’t think, I don’t think the battle is to a business user that, hey, buy an AMD versus an Intel versus a Qualcomm. I think the battle of the business user is going to be, is AMD the right design points that they would desire. With the answer yes, because we showed yesterday 150 plus designs available this year.
Does AMD have the performance and the power and the AI capabilities to do all the modern work that I want to and do so flawlessly? The answer is yes.
RT: And then I think the third thing that I would leave you with is business continuity planning for a CIO. They look at us and they look at the competition. Competition is in quite a bit of disarray. Do you want to have, you know, someone in your corporation, a PC provider that has a consistent roadmap, winning roadmap for many years now?
Why do you think Dell is betting on [AMD]? Because they’ve seen our consistent multi-year road map, right? Why do you think we have 150-plus designs? Because all of the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers such as Acer, Dell and Lenovo] have seen what we’re doing in 25, 26, 27 and 28 and they’re excited about what they’re seeing.
They’ve seen the stability of our products over the years. They’ve seen the stability of our leadership, and our growth story and all of that.
So I think that’s my third meta point. Okay, performance, leadership, great products. Easy to deploy, easy to manage, easy to secure – remove that objection. Don’t worry, we got the same things or better in that regard. Now, are you thinking about who’s your long-term partner the right way?
I know historically what you did, but as you look to the future and you see what the competition is going through, I would ask those questions.
TD: You don’t just have one set of competition, now, with Qualcomm also proving to be a strong rival – particularly in the mid-range space if you look at speeds and feeds. So what about them? How does that affect your priorities in 2025 compared to 2024?
RT: You know, I think to your point, there’s a lot more silicon diversity in the ecosystem than a few years ago, right? And I welcome that. Competition is good. I think it’s about time we had more competition in this space. But I’m very happy with the hand that we have.
We have a roadmap that is going to continue to win, that’s going to continue to grow. I’m really happy with the bets we made with OEMs and the number of products we’re going to launch this year – we’re going to cover large spots of the market.
Am I worried about Qualcomm? I’m always watching for what they’re doing, how their products are landing. But honestly, if you think about ecosystem compatibility, app compatibility and those issues, they’ve got a huge road ahead. They’ve got to work through a lot of things. x86 is an established ecosystem, we’re an established player in the x86 market with 40-plus years doing this, right?
So I feel like we have a really good hand to play here and we’re humble. I’m not entitled. I’m just saying, with the products that we have, the capabilities that we have, we need our fair share and that’s what we’re driving for.
I think the corporations will be pleased with the products we’re launching. They’ll see the results of the pilots for themselves, and they’ll be like, okay, wow, this technology is something I want. And you know, let the competition play out.
TD: Do you think that Intel was entitled?
RT: [Laughs] I think they’re a great competitor, I give them kudos for what they have too. In the marketplace. We have competed with them for decades, but now is our time. Now is our time.
