AMD’s wins, fails, and WTF moments of 2024

No doubt about it, AMD had a very good year.

Our recap of AMD’s highs, lows, and head-scratching moments of 2024 doesn’t reveal too many mistakes. At times, Intel stumbled through 2024 like someone coming home from the pub on Christmas Eve. But AMD was steady, reliable, and mostly dependable.

See if you agree with us as we walk through the best and worst of AMD’s 2024, as we’ve done (or will do) for Microsoft, Google, and Intel. Will AMD be able to keep up the pace in 2025?

AMD Ryzen 8000: FAIL

Calling this family a failure may seem a hit harsh, but it’s true that this was one of the few missteps by AMD all year. The Ryzen 8000 family fell a bit short on a few fronts: First, it was entirely made up of APUs, with no cheaper options without integrated graphics. For desktop gamers who favor graphics cards, that’s just wasted silicon. Second, while the chips offered AI capabilities, they fell short of Copilot+ PC status — and again, gamers have always been a bit suspicious of AI. The Ryzen 8000 also began shipping a few months after its announcement.

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At the time, Intel’s 14th-gen Core chips were delivering impressive performance with less care paid to battery life. And since the Ryzen 8000 was announced at the same time as the Ryzen 5000 series, it felt like people just stopped talking about the Zen 4-based 8000 and wondered when the Zen 5-based 9000 series would appear.

AMD Ryzen 5700X3D: WIN

It’s probably fair to say that the Ryzen 8000 was overshadowed by the 5700X3D, too, which was announced alongside it.

One of AMD’s most attractive characteristics is the longevity of its platforms, and the Ryzen 8000 was designed around the AM5 socket. The Ryzen 5700X3D had two things going for it: First, it was yet another processor on the venerable AM4 socket, allowing customers to extend their PCs a bit longer; and second, by then the X3D’s monstrous cache had become a fan favorite. While I don’t have any numbers on how the 5700X3D sold, my guess is that it was a more appealing part than the Ryzen 8000 APUs.

It has to be noted, though, that the 5700X3D was a Zen 3 part, with slower clock speeds that pushed down productivity performance. For gamers, though, the Ryzen 5700X3D was just what they asked for.

AMD’s mainstream GPU strategy: WIN

AMD’s GPU business in 2024 and 2025 will be guided by this storyline: Nvidia has won the high-end GPU market, and everyone else is chasing the scraps. That’s not totally true, but close enough! AMD’s senior vice president Jack Huynh revealed AMD’s new direction in September, explaining that he’d rather chase 80 percent of the lower-cost, mainstream market than the top 20 percent, or the premium offerings.

Thiago Trevisan / IDG

Since we don’t know what AMD has up its sleeve for 2025, we can’t be sure if AMD will hold to this price/performance strategy or not. Keep in mind, though, that AMD has found a comfortable little niche, with minority positions in CPUs and GPUs, but also enterprise CPUs, graphics, and AI. The profit margins that AMD has for products in the latter three categories help offset the challenges of competing in the PC space.

AMD’s GPU pricing strategy: WIN

It hasn’t been easy, though, and February’s launch of the rival Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 for $169 was evidence of that. Nvidia is expected to launch consumer versions of its “Blackwell” architecture (the GeForce 5000 family) in 2025, most likely at CES with eye-popping specs and prices. But there’s a risk that it could just drop an update to an older architecture to essentially torpedo AMD’s ambitions.

AMD (and its customers) have been willing to adjust pricing, however, to their credit. AMD’s partner, Sapphire, dropped the price of the Radeon 7900XT card by $200 in February, probably to compete with new “Super” versions of Nvidia’s cards.

Radeon Link, RIP: FAIL

In January, AMD ended support for the Radeon Link mobile app, which allowed gamers to stream games from PCs with Radeon graphics cards to phones and tablets running with Android or iOS.

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AMD’s right in that there are numerous other ways to stream games, including Microsoft’s own Xbox application, as well as portable PCs. Still, its a shame to take a tried-and-true solution and just ditch it wholesale.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1: WIN

While AMD’s partners should be applauded for making pricing adjustments, there’s a bit of subtext to all of this, too: The hardware doesn’t always determine how a game will play. We’ve known for some time that driver improvements will push frames higher, but so too will some of the most revolutionary technologies in the past few years: graphics upscaling and frame generation. In March, AMD debuted AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1), an improved version of its FidelityFX 3.0 technology.

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FSR 3.1 decouples upscaling from frame generation, an interesting tweak. FSR can boost frame rates by up to three times in games like Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut. That’s substantial. But AMD also promised FSR would be coming to 40 games when FSR 3.1 was announced in March. It’s now December, and AMD lists 36 (between FSR2 and FSR3) on its games page.

AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2.0: WIN

While FSR began as an upscaling technology, AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames was always a way to smooth frame rates by interjecting new (some call these “fake” frames) in between the frames the game asks for. While this technically boosts frame rates, its goal is to actually provide smoother gameplay. AMD began 2024 by basically making FMF 1.0 available to all DirectX games; in October, AMD debuted FMF 2.0 as well.

The problem within frame generation is that those extra frames introduce latency, another thing that gamers tend to avoid. FMF 2.0 is specifically designed to reduce latency by using AI (of course). Fortunately, it’s applicable to both AMD’s integrated graphics as well as RX 6000- and RX 7000-series GPUs.

AMD’s handheld dominance: WIN

I don’t own a handheld gaming PC, and my wife would probably start screaming at me if I brought it up, using words like “mortgage” and “vacation money” and “the price of eggs.” Anyway, if you are in the market for a handheld PC, it’s a virtual lock that an AMD processor is inside.

PCWelt/Asus/Amazon

2024 may have been an off year for consoles — which use AMD chips, too, by the way. But the resurgence of portable PCs has meant renewed interest in AMD’s Z-series processors: The Z1 and the Z1 Extreme. (The Z2 may debut at CES.) Basically, it’s news any time a handheld doesn’t use an AMD chip inside.

Microsoft passes over AMD for Surface: FAIL

This year, 2024, was the year of the Copilot+ PC and especially Windows on Arm. AMD has always struggled somewhat to attract customers in the mobile space, and this year numerous PC makers signed up to manufacture at least one PC designed around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite platform.

In 2019, AMD cracked Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 3 with a custom-designed Ryzen processor, and Microsoft and AMD maintained a fairly steady relationship. But in 2024 Surface sold out wholesale to the Snapdragon, and AMD was left out in the cold. If Qualcomm can keep up its combination of long battery life and decent computing performance, AMD could be pushed aside.

Matthew Smith / IDG

AMD’s Copilot+ PC conundrum: WTF

In March, Microsoft introduced the concept of a Copilot+ PC, complete with an AI-powered CPU to drive Microsoft’s collection of AI apps. Microsoft launched Copilot+ PCs with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform, but promised that a Windows update would bless PCs running on AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 processor and Intel’s Lunar Lake with Copilot+ capabilities, too. But that…didn’t happen. Instead, Microsoft delayed the controversial Recall feature, letting those with Snapdragon-powered PCs test out generative AI features instead.

Foundry

As for the others? In December, Microsoft pushed the Windows update that allows the AMD and Intel Copilot+ PCs to test out Recall — and that’s all. If you want to keep the AI hype train going, this is not how you do it, Microsoft. Unfortunately, it’s AMD (and Intel) who were burned.

AMD Ryzen AI 300: WIN

Honestly, the current crop of laptop processors — Snapdragon X Elite, Intel’s Lunar Lake, and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 — may be both the best and most competitive mobile processor generation in history. They’re all excellent in their own way. With over 50 TOPS plus a Radeon 3.5 GPU, the Ryzen AI 300 looks great on paper, and tested at the top of the heap in terms of performance as well. It’s why I argued that AMD should acknowledge the low-power efforts of its competition, but strive for performance instead.

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The next test will be in gaming: AMD’s “Strix Halo” versus the Intel Core HX processor. Expect to see a showdown in mobile gaming at CES this January…with possibly an Nvidia “Blackwell” mobile GPU alongside them.

All these wins had to pay off, right? Yep. AMD now seems to consistently record quarter after quarter of strong revenues and profits. AMD’s market share also soared, especially in desktop. There, AMD recorded growth of 10 percentage points in its desktop market share alone.

Ryzen 9000: WTF

AMD’s Ryzen 8000 APUs may have met with a mixed reception, but the launch of the Ryzen 9000 desktop processors at Computex in June was very well-received…even after a bump or two. A promised 40 percent improvement over Intel’s 14th-gen Cores! AMD even confirmed that the AM5 socket (the foundation for the Ryzen 9000) would be supported until 2027, and ditched AI and integrated GPUs on its four new parts. Things were looking great!

Willis Lai / Foundry

But then it got a little weird. After discovering a “quality issue,” AMD delayed the Ryzen 9000 launch until August. But then AMD cut the Ryzen 9000 prices, lower than its predecessor! But then the actual Ryzen 9000 review was disappointing…but for a reason! But after installing Windows 11’s 2024 Update…performance soared again! And then there was another update, this time to the firmware, that pumped 105W through the chips for even higher performance.

Yeah, this probably concluded in “WIN” territory, but after a rocky ride through “WTF land.”

Ryzen 9000X3D: WIN

We conclude with what should be the biggest victory of AMD’s 2024: The Ryzen 9000X3D gaming behemoth. If this chip was AMD’s final exam of 2024, the company showed that it understood the assignment: low power and kick-ass gaming performance. It won our award for the best desktop CPU of 2024, and for good reason: Not only did it obliterate Intel’s best in both games and content creation, it did so while consuming less power, too. What can’t AMD’s V-Cache do?

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If there was any downside, it’s that the 9800X3D promptly sold out. But just wait, AMD says more are coming.

And with that, we conclude one of AMD’s best years ever. Happy holidays to you and yours, and be sure to join us in January for CES, and the next chapter of AMD’s story!