At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, AMD showcased its latest Ryzen chip innovations, including the highly anticipated Strix Halo high-end accelerated processing unit (APU) and the new flagship Fire Range series. The standout is the Ryzen AI Max and AI Max+ laptop chips, touted as AMD's most powerful AI chips for laptops to date.
The Ryzen AI Max chips feature up to 40 compute units based on RDNA 3.5 architecture, 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, and 32 threads. They come with a new memory interface offering 256GB/s bandwidth, supporting up to 128GB of shared memory for CPU, GPU, and XDNA 2 NPU AI engines. These chips target gaming enthusiasts and the workstation market, although AMD has not released real gaming benchmark results yet.
AMD claims the high-end Ryzen AI Max+395 chip offers graphics performance 1.4 times greater than Intel's top Lunar Lake chip, the Core 9 288V processor, and 3D rendering performance 2.6 times higher. Additionally, it reportedly outperforms the desktop NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU in AI workloads by up to 2.2 times while reducing thermal design power (TDP) by 87%.
The AI Max series will debut in the first half of the year, featuring in upcoming Copilot+ PCs like the HP ZBook Ultra G1A mobile workstation and ASUS ROG Flow Z13 gaming 2-in-1 computer.
AMD also revealed the Fire Range series, including the flagship desktop CPU Ryzen 9 9950X3D, designed for gamers and creators. It features 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, 32 threads, and a 5.7GHz clock speed. The 9950X3D reportedly delivers 8% faster performance in popular games compared to its predecessor, the 7950X3D, and is 20% faster than Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K.
AMD plans to release the Fire Range chips, including Ryzen 9 9850HX, 9955HX, and 9955HX3D, in the first half of 2025.
