this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Much like their laptops, I'm all for the idea, but what makes this desirable by those of us with no interest in AI?
I'm out of that loop though I get that AI is typically graphics processing heavy, can this be taken advantage of with other things like video rendering?
I just don't know exactly what an AI CPU such as the Ryzen AI Max offers over a non-AI equivalent processor.
Juat maybe not all products need to be for everyone.
Sometimes it's fine if a product fits your label of "Not for me".
There is a massive push right now for energy efficient alternatives to nvidia GPUs for AI/ML. PLENTY of companies are dumping massive amounts of money on macs and rapidly learning the lesson the rest of us learned decades ago in terms of power and performance.
The reality is that this is going to be marketed for AI because it has an APU which, keeping it simple, is a CPU+GPU. And plenty of companies are going to rush to buy them for that and a very limited subset will have a good experience because they don't have time sensitive operations.
But yeah, this is very much geared for light-moderate gaming, video rendering, and HTPCs. That is what APUs are actually good for. They make amazing workstations. I could also see this potentially being very useful for a small business/household local LLM for stuff like code generation and the like but... those small scale models don't need anywhere near these resources.
As for framework being involved: Someone has kindly explained to me that even though you have to replace the entire mobo to increase the amount of memory, you can still customize your side panels at any moment so I guess that is fitting the mission statement.
For modularity: There's also modular front I/O using the existing USB-C cards, and everything they installed uses standard connectors.
There's lots of workstation niches that are gated by VRAM size, like very complex rendering, scientific workloads, image/video processing... It's not mega fast, but basically this can do things at a reasonable speed that you'd normally need a $20K+ computer to even try. Like, if something takes hours on an A6000 Ada or an A100, just waiting overnight on one of these is not a big deal. Cashing or failing to launch on a 4090 or 7900 XTX is.
That aside, the IGP is massively faster than any other integrated graphics you'll find. It's reasonably power efficient.
I hate how power hungry the regular desktop platform is so having capable APUs like this that will use less power at full load than a comparable CPU+GPU combo at idle, is great, though it needs to become a lot more affordable.
Production costs are not low either, and AMD still needs to profit. AMD's APUs are already very affordable.
Its nothing like their laptops, thats the issue :/ Soldered in stuff all around, nonstandard parts that make it useless for use as a standard PC or gaming console.
Sorry, I was stating that "much like their laptops, I like the idea of these desktops." I was not trying to insinuate that they themselves are alike.