HP Intros ‘World’s Highest-Performance AI PC,’ Pushing AMD Chip To New Heights

The PC and print giant says a ‘deep co-engineering’ partnership with AMD allowed it to push the limit for neural processing unit performance in its forthcoming OmniBook Ultra laptop, which will benefit a growing number of AI-enabled applications.

HP Inc. is calling its newly revealed OmniBook Ultra laptop the “world’s highest-performance AI PC,” and to achieve that, the company said it engaged in a “deep co-engineering” partnership with AMD to push the computer’s neural processing unit to new heights.

The PC and print giant on Monday said that the 14-inch laptop, set for an August release, will use AMD’s new Ryzen AI 300 series processors and push the processor’s neural processing unit (NPU) to up to 55 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which will enable the PC to run AI workloads faster and more workloads simultaneously.

[Related: HP Is Bullish on New Qualcomm PCs But Says Adoption Will Take Time]

The consumer-focused OmniBook Ultra was part of a handful of announcements HP made at its Imagine AI event in New York last Thursday, where the company showcased several independent software providers, including Cephable and Zoom, who are taking advantage of the NPU to deliver new AI-enabled experiences available for AI PCs now or later this year.

At the event, Alex Cho, president of personal systems at HP, said the integration of AI technologies within applications, operating systems and hardware systems represents a “huge shift” that will empower people, enabling “better decision making, better analysis and exceptional creativity available for everyone.”

“In this era, our vision is to make sure that people can unlock the power of AI and transform how they think about work and [how they are] connecting with other people and getting things done. And doing that not just to be more productive, but it’s about being a catalyst for employee growth and more fulfilling work experiences,” he said.

With the OmniBook Ultra pushing 55 TOPS through the Ryzen AI 300 chip’s NPU, it’s pushing AI performance beyond the maximum 50 TOPS previously disclosed by AMD for the NPU within the new processor series, which also feature a CPU and GPU.

According to HP, the OmniBook Ultra’s NPU performance is 45 percent higher than Apple’s recently launched M4 system-on-chip, which is available in the latest iPad Pro, and almost two times higher than the company’s M3 chip, which is available in several Mac computers.

It’s also higher than the 40 TOPS NPU performance of Qualcomm’s recently launched Snapdragon X processors, which power HP’s new OmniBook X and EliteBook Ultra laptops.

Cho called this a “unique” differentiator for HP and said it’s part of a broader effort by the company to optimize various software and hardware components for its PCs.

“We are curating the stack from silicon, BIOS, [operating systems], applications, I/O, etc. And doing that deep co-engineering with [AMD] allowed us to deliver a level of performance that is above the rest of the industry,” he told CRN last Thursday.

An AMD spokesperson told CRN that HP approached the chip designer about increasing the NPU performance of its Ryzen AI 300 series.

“As a result of close co-engineering work, AMD and HP developed a custom solution enabling 55 TOPS on the Ryzen AI 300 Series for the OmniBook Ultra,” the representative said.

As for other features, the OmniBook Ultra supports up to 21 hours of battery life, the new HP AI Companion application for enabling greater productivity and AI-based system tuning, an AI-enabled high-resolution 9-megapixel camera, and, for the first time in an HP consumer laptop, the company’s Wolf Security endpoint protection software.

HP said the laptop will support Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC experiences when an updated is available from the operating system giant. This is unlike HP’s Snapdragon X-based EliteBook Ultra and OmniBook X laptops, which supported Copilot+ at launch.

The new OmniBook and EliteBook laptops represent the second wave of AI PCs to come out from HP after the company in March debuted business laptops and mobile workstations that are part of what it called the “industry’s largest” AI PC portfolio.