AMD's multiple Ryzen new products made a splash at CES, showcasing the strongest AI laptop chip, with the best gaming CPU speed far surpassing Intel Core

The annual tech gala—the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, USA—saw AMD showcasing multiple new Ryzen chips, including the much-rumored high-end accelerated processor (APU) codenamed Strix Halo, as well as the new generation flagship Fire Range series.

Among them, the most eye-catching is the so-called most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) laptop chip from AMD to date, namely the Ryzen AI Max and AI Max+ laptop chips. It features up to 40 compute units (CU) based on the RDNA 3.5 architecture, equipped with 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 32 threads, along with a new memory interface with a bandwidth of 256GB per second, supporting up to 128GB of memory shared among the CPU, GPU, and XDNA 2 NPU AI engine.

The Strix Halo chip targets gaming enthusiasts and the workstation market. AMD provided synthetic 3D benchmark test results for comparison but did not share real gaming benchmark data.

AMD claims that the top-end Ryzen AI Max +395 chip's graphics performance is more than 1.4 times that of Intel's highest-end Lunar Lake Core i9 288V processor, and its 3D rendering performance is 2.6 times that of the latter. The rendering performance of the 16-core Ryzen AI Max flagship new product is 84% faster than that of the 12-core Apple MacBook M4 Pro.

In terms of AI workloads, the performance of the aforementioned top-end Ryzen AI Max + chip is up to 2.2 times that of a standalone desktop NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, while its thermal design power (TDP) is reduced by 87%.

Rahul Tikoo, General Manager of AMD's Client Computing Business, stated that the Ryzen AI Max adds a whole new category of PCs to AMD's next-generation AI platform in the market. It is a very powerful chip that delivers incredible performance, reshaping the experience for customers from workstations and thin-and-light laptops to compact yet powerful mini desktops.

The AI Max series will make its debut in the first half of this year and will appear in the upcoming Copilot+ PCs, such as the HP ZBook Ultra G1A mobile workstation, HP Z2 Mini G1a mini workstation, and ASUS ROG Flow Z13 gaming 2-in-1 computer.

The following image shows the Ryzen AI Max and AI Max Pro series chips and related configuration parameters that AMD plans to launch in the first and second quarters of 2025.

Best Gaming and Creator CPU Ryzen 9 9950X3D

AMD also announced the new HX and X3D series laptop chips codenamed Fire Range, which utilize the 3D V-Cache stacking cache technology previously applied only in the 7945HX3D processor, featuring 16 Zen 4 CPU cores and a total of 144MB of cache.

This includes the latest flagship desktop CPU, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

AMD introduced that the 9950X3D is aimed at "gamers and creators" and is "the best gaming and creator processor in the world," featuring 16 CPU cores based on the Zen 5 architecture, 32 threads, and a clock speed of up to 5.7GHz, with a total cache of 144MB.

According to AMD, based on benchmarks from 40 titles at 1080p, the average speed of the 9950X3D while running popular games like Hogwarts Legacy and StarCraft should be 8% faster than its predecessor, the 7950X3D. Gaming performance is expected to be similar to the 9800X3D, with a difference of less than 1%.

AMD even claims that in the same games, the 9950X3D is 20% faster than Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K, but considering Intel's upcoming performance boost for the 285K, the gap may narrow.

As a complement to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D, AMD will also launch a new "Fire Range" chip series aimed at mid-range laptops and ultra-portable computers. This series is set to launch in the first half of 2025 and will include the Ryzen 9 9850HX, 9955HX, and 9955HX3D, offering 12 to 16 cores, with maximum clock speeds ranging from 5.2GHz to 5.4GHz.

The image below shows the Fire Range series chips and related parameters that AMD plans to release in the first half of 2025.