CES 2025 Day 0 – AI everyone?

AI takes over.

CES 2025 Outlook – The AI have-nots

• Automotive will play second fiddle this year as CES 2025 is going to be dominated by AI whether one likes it or not.
• A great example of this is Google which has updated its smart TV OS to include Gemini-powered news summaries called News Brief which scrapes YouTube and the Internet and generates a summary of the top headlines with links to view different stories.
• This goes hand in hand with the TV makers who are all trying to sell more TVs by making them smarter rather than bigger or with higher resolution.
• Almost everyone will be playing the AI game to garner as much attention as possible meaning that the place to look will be companies and products that don’t make any AI claims.
• To survive at CES 2025 and not use a liberal sprinkling of AI pixie dust will mean that real innovation with market potential will have taken place.
• Hence, this is where I am most interested in looking this year as most commentators are likely to pass them by.

AMD – Raising the stakes

• AMD focused its press conference on taking the fight to Intel and its newest competitor Qualcomm.
• For desktops, two new processors (9950X3D and 9900X3D) join the X3D family targeting gaming but it was on AI PCs where AMD really went to town.
• Here, AMD announced a lot of different processors all with the new XDNA 2 neural processor on board which is capable of running at 50 TOPS.
• This is a step up in performance which will almost certainly be matched or passed the next time both Intel and Qualcomm update their offerings.
• On top of a Ryzen 5/7/9 version for AI PCs, AMD also announced the Ryzen AI Max series topped off with its AI Max Pro which AMD claims can bring workstation workloads to thin and light desktops.
• This was benchmarked with the claim that the AI Max Pro has enough memory to run a 70bn parameter LLM with excellent performance and efficiency.
• On all of the benchmarks, AMD claimed to be ahead of Qualcomm and miles ahead of Intel to which Qualcomm is likely to respond with “Show me what happens when you unplug the laptop”.
• This is because the x86 AI-enabled processors tend to throttle performance to preserve battery life when unplugged which is something neither Apple nor Qualcomm have had to do.
• It also shows that benchmarks are pretty easy to mess around with and so I don’t put a huge amount of value in them, but it is clear that AMD is coming out of the Christmas break swinging.
• The real winner here is the PC buyer as for the first time in many years there is real competition in the chips meaning that devices will become more capable and offer more value per dollar spent.

Nvidia – The Line

• While Jensen was in fine fettle and with plenty to say, the real story of the keynote was the line to get into the venue which speaks volumes of the market power that Nvidia now has.
• Several years ago, the keynote was held in the MGM Grand Conference Centre and there was no queue and plenty of room for everyone.
• This year it was in the Mandalay Bay ULTRA Arena where some people queued for an hour and still did not get in.
• For many people in the queue, it was the promise of seeing the man in the flesh as opposed to anything that he had to say.
• Nvidia launched new PC graphics chips called the RTX 50 series that take shading and face rendering to new levels as well as a deal with Toyota and a desktop computing device developed in partnership with MediaTek.
• Nvidia’s deal with Toyota is significant as Toyota will use Nvidia chips, its software and its platforms to power its autonomous driving solution while Aurora Innovation and Tier 1 supplier Continental are also announcing deals with Nvidia.
• Most interesting is the desktop supercomputer capable of running a 200bn parameter model which is aimed at AI researchers and model developers.
• This was designed with Mediatek but uses Nvidia GPUs and CPU cores leading me to think that Mediatek designed the CPU overall but used Grace CPU cores rather than the Arm cores that it usually uses in its other products.
• This is a big boost for MediaTek because being associated with Nvidia will give it credibility and market awareness at levels that it has never seen before.
• With almost all of its revenues now coming from the data centre, CES is a bit of a sideshow for Nvidia these days but the excitement and popularity that surrounds the company at the moment has to be seen to be believed.