In football, they call it an end run.
The term describes a running play where the ball carrier tries to avoid being tackled by attempting to outflank the defensive end.
Related: Analysts reboot AMD stock price targets on AI market outlook
If the move pays off, you can spare yourself a lot of bumps and bruises
In the very high-stakes game of artificial intelligence, Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) face each other on the line of scrimmage.
Nvidia is currently ahead in the AI competition. Soaring sales of AI chips used in data centers have made it the most valuable public company, worth $3.4 trillion.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft will be front and center in the race to a $4 trillion market cap over the next year.
What about AMD?
Well, on Tuesday, the chipmaker announced that Sun Singapore Systems Pte. Ltd., which it calls “the largest smart parking solutions provider in Singapore,” is deploying a new AI-based smart parking solution powered by AMD Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC devices.
The system, AMD said, “improves the accuracy of vehicle license plate recognition and enables advanced features like parking spot vacancy detection, lane jam, accident detection, and parking violation enforcement.”
AMD CEO Lisu Su says the chipmaker is ‘excited about growth opportunities in the PC market’
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Growing number of AI-capable PCs
Beyond that, AMD is looking beyond the headline-grabbing data center demand for high-end AI chips, focusing on another aspect of the AI market.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company wants to carve out a hefty chunk of the AI personal computer market.
Related: AMD fires latest shot at Nvidia in AI-chip war
A study released in January by the technology market analysis firm Canalys predicted that 60% of PCs shipped by 2027 will be AI-capable, marking “a significant shift in the technology landscape.”
“The emergence of AI-capable PCs brings with it several key opportunities for industry players, including a boost to current and future device refresh cycles and the chance to meaningfully differentiate with out-of-the-box AI tools and attached services,” the report said.
Canalys said that the future of AI will be hybrid.
While cloud-based AI tools have driven the initial wave of interest and innovation, the study said that the benefits of moving certain workloads onto client devices are quickly becoming apparent.
“Privacy and security become critical as businesses and consumers increasingly look for AI use cases that leverage models trained on enterprise and personal data,” Canalys said.
AMD introduced its Ryzen AI 300 Series processors with neural processing units (NPU) for next-generation AI personal computers and the next-gen AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors for desktops during the recent Computex Taipai 2024 technology trade show.
The company described the Ryzen AI 300 Series processors as “the ultimate choice for elite content creation laptops.”
The Ryzen brand is used for desktop, mobile, server, and embedded platforms based on the Zen microarchitecture.
AMD said early this year that Ryzen CPUs are powering more than 90% of Al-enabled PCs currently in the market.
AMD CEO Lisa Su: ‘we’re excited about AI growth’
“We expanded our portfolio of leadership enterprise PC offerings with the launch of our Ryzen Pro 8000 processors earlier this month,” Lisa Su, president and CEO, told analysts in April.
“Ryzen Pro 8040 mobile CPUs deliver industry-leading performance and battery life for commercial notebooks, and our Ryzen Pro 8000 series desktop CPUs are the first processor to offer dedicated on-chip AI accelerators in commercial desktop PCs,” she said.
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Su said that AMD sees “clear opportunities to gain additional commercial PC share based on the performance and efficiency advantages of our Ryzen Pro portfolio and an expanded set of AMD-powered commercial PCs from our OEM partners.”
“Looking forward, we believe the market is on track to return to annual growth in 2024, driven by the start of an enterprise refresh cycle in AI PC adoption,” she said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “We see AI as the biggest inflection point in PCs since the internet with the ability to deliver unprecedented productivity and usability gains.”
Su said the company is taking the next major step in its AI PC roadmap later this year with the launch of the next-generation Ryzen mobile processors codenamed Strix, which she said: “enables next-generation AI experiences in laptops that are thinner, lighter, and faster than ever before.”
“We’re excited about the growth opportunities for the PC market,” she added.
Stifel analyst Ruben Roy, who has a buy rating on AMD shares with a $200 price target, recently discussed mixed sentiment on AMD shares.
He attributed this to several factors, including a wide range of assumptions for MI-series GPUs in 2025, concerns regarding the company’s competitive positioning in the AI-compute and PC end markets, as well as the potential for continued pressure on the mainstream x86 server market, according to Tipranks.
“Nevertheless, we continue to believe AMD is positioned to benefit from various medium-term growth drivers including (i) AI-infrastructure investment, (ii) continued x86 CPU share gains, and (iii) an AI-driven PC refresh cycle,” Roy said.
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