AMD's CES announcements include a tease about next-gen graphics cards, a new flagship desktop CPU, and a modest refresh of its processors for handheld gaming PCs. But the company's largest announcement, by volume, is about laptop processors.

Today the company is expanding the Ryzen AI 300 lineup with a batch of updated high-end chips with up to 16 CPU cores and some midrange options for cheaper Copilot+ PCs. AMD has repackaged some of its high-end desktop chips for gaming laptops, including the first Ryzen laptop CPU with 3D V-Cache enabled. And there's also a new-in-name-only Ryzen 200 series, another repackaging of familiar silicon to address lower-budget laptops.

Ryzen AI 300 is back, along with high-end Max and Max+ versions

Ryzen AI is back, with Max and Max+ versions that include huge integrated GPUs. Credit: AMD

We came away largely impressed by the initial Ryzen AI 300 processors in August 2024, and new processors being announced today expand the lineup upward and downward.

Read full article

Comments

© AMD

AMD's batch of CES announcements this year includes just two new products for desktop PC users: the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D. Both will be available at some point in the first quarter of 2025.

Both processors include additional CPU cores compared to the 9800X3D that launched in November. The 9900X3D includes 12 Zen 5 CPU cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.5 GHz, and the 9950X3D includes 16 cores with a maximum clock speed of 5.7 GHz. Both include 64MB of extra L3 cache compared to the regular 9900X and 9950X, for a total cache of 144MB and 140MB, respectively; games in particular tend to benefit disproportionately from this extra cache memory.

But the 9950X3D and 9900X3D aren't being targeted at people who build PCs primarily to game—the company says their game performance is usually within 1 percent of the 9800X3D. These processors are for people who want peak game performance when they're playing something but also need lots of CPU cores for chewing on CPU-heavy workloads during the workday.

Read full article

Comments

© AMD

Nearly two years ago, AMD announced its first Ryzen Z1 processors. These were essentially the same silicon that AMD was putting in high-end thin-and-light laptops but tuned specifically for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally X. As part of its CES announcements today, AMD is refreshing that lineup with three processors, all slated for an undisclosed date in the first quarter of 2025.

Although they're all part of the "Ryzen Z2" family, each of these three chips is actually much different under the hood, and some of them are newer than others.

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme is what you'd expect from a refresh: a straightforward upgrade to both the CPU and GPU architectures of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. Based on the same "Strix Point" architecture as the Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors, the Z2 Extreme includes eight CPU cores (three high-performance Zen 5 cores, five smaller and efficiency-optimized Zen 5C cores) and an unnamed RDNA 3.5 GPU with 16 of AMD's compute units (CUs). These should both provide small bumps to CPU and GPU performance relative to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which used eight Zen 4 CPU cores and 12 RDNA 3 GPU cores.

Read full article

Comments

© AMD