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At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, AMD unveiled a slew of new chips destined for devices ranging from desktops to gaming handhelds.
AMD is riding high coming into this year’s CES. The company commanded a 28.7% share of the desktop CPU segment in Q3 2024, up 9.6 percentage points compared to the same quarter the year prior. In mobile, AMD held 22.3% of the chip market as of last Q3, a 2.8-percentage-point uptick from the previous fiscal period.
The company isn’t resting on its laurels, though. AMD’s 2025 strategy is aggressive and multi-pronged — and it begins with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D.
Aimed at “gamers and creators,” the 9950X3D has 16 cores based on AMD’s Zen 5 architecture clocked up to 5.7GHz. According to the company’s benchmarks, the 9950X3D is 8% faster on average in popular games like Hogwarts Legacy and Starfield versus AMD’s 7950X3D.
Image Credits:AMD
The 9950X3D, along with the Ryzen 9 9900X3D, a lower-tier processor with 12 cores clocked up to 5.5GHz, will ship sometime in Q1 2025, AMD said.
To complement the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D, AMD also announced a new “Fire Range” lineup of chips targeting midrange laptops and ultraportables. Set to launch in the first half of 2025, the series — which includes the Ryzen 9 9850HX, 9955HX, and 9955HX3D — offers 12 to 16 cores clocked at between 5.2GHz and 5.4GHz at the maximum.
Notably, the Fire Range chips draw around ~54 W of power — less than half the wattage requirement of the 9950X3D (170 W).
AI PC chips
To power the next generation of Copilot+ PCs — laptops and compact desktops with AI-accelerated Windows 11 features — AMD is launching new and refreshed processor series: the Ryzen AI 300 series and Ryzen AI Max series.
All chips in the series have a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) to accelerate certain AI workloads, like running a text-summarizing language model or Windows 11’s AI-powered image editor.
Ryzen 300 series chips, which will come to market in Q1/Q2 2025, pack between 6 and 8 cores clocked at up to 5GHz, and deliver “24-plus-hour” battery life in the best-case scenario (e.g. light work only). There’s four SKUs: Ryzen AI 7 350, Ryzen AI 5 340, Ryzen AI 7 Pro 350, and Ryzen AI 5 Pro 340.
Image Credits:AMD
As for Ryzen AI Max, it’s AMD’s flagship offering for Copilot+ PCs, with between 6 and 16 cores clocked at up to 5.1GHz, paired with built-in graphics and a new memory interface. AMD’s claiming that Ryzen AI Max chips can achieve leading 3D rendering and AI application performance.
SKUs in the series — which include the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395, Ryzen AI Max 390, Ryzen AI Max Pro 390, Ryzen AI Max 385, Ryzen AI Max Pro 385, and Ryzen AI Max Pro 380 — are set to launch beginning Q1/Q2.
Targeting more budget-friendly, “mainstream” devices, AMD also debuted the new Ryzen 200 series of chips. The processors — most of which sport NPUs — have between 6 and 8 cores clocked up to 5.2GHz, and are scheduled to launch in Q2 2025.
Handheld processors
Handheld PCs like Valve’s Steam Deck continue to be a major growth area for AMD. To that end, the chipmaker announced new processors in its Ryzen Z2 series, which is meant for lightweight and gaming-focused form factors.
There’s the Ryzen Z2 Go, which has four cores clocked up to 4.3GHz and 12 graphics cores, and the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, which has eight cores clocked up to 5.0Ghz and 16 graphics cores. They join the eight-core Ryzen Z2, whose cores top out at 5.1GHz and which packs 12 graphics cores.
All three Ryzen Z2 SKUs will be available Q1 2025.
Graphics cards
Lastly, AMD revealed its next set of discrete, desktop-bound GPUs: the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070. They’re based on the company’s RDNA 4 architecture, a 4nm architecture that the company says features improved ray tracing performance, better media encoding quality, and improved AI acceleration.
RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 cards will be available from manufacturers including Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, and XFX in Q1 2025.
Image Credits:AMD
AMD highlighted its FidelityFX Super Resolution 4.0 upscaling technology, which it says was developed for RDNA 4 hardware. Super Resolution 4.0 leverages AI algorithms to upscale game content to up to 4K resolution with minimal latency, AMD says.
In a related development, AMD Adrenalin, AMD’s software that lets users manage and tune their AMD hardware, including Radeon graphics cards, has new AI features. Adrenalin can now generate images using a built-in image generation model, leverage a local language model to summarize files like PDFs, and answer AMD-related questions via an AI-powered chatbot interface.
