AMD’s powerful Radeon 9000 Gaming CPUs are coming to Laptops

Image AMDDon’t let Nvidia have all the fun, the AMD slate CPU is drastically expanding to the top of 2025. Team Red has games and graphics in mind with the expected Zen 5, Ryzen 9 X3D chips to take the top slot for tall – Powered gaming PC. After that, the all-new RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9700 cards are meant to compete against Nvidia’s mid-range offerings, though we’ll need to wait a bit longer for any hint if AMD wants to compete in the GPU realm. high end. .

The two new AMD CPUs include the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and the 9950X3D. The first is a 12-core, 24-thread configuration with a max boost of 5.5 Ghz and a cache of 140 MB. The new top-end for consumer AMD CPUs includes 16-cores and 32-threads with a frequency of 5.7 Ghz and 144 MB of cache. We are particularly interested in the new Ryzen 9 9955HX3D laptop chip. It has the same thread, core and TDP as the high-end desktop chip

Team Red fans have been clamoring to get their first look at AMD’s new flagship gaming CPU. The top-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D has been boosted by the Zen 4. It promises more than 20% better in-game performance from games like The legacy of Hogwarts and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marines 2 compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. However, you will not see much difference between the two in a game like this Wukong Black Myth o Cyberpunk 2077depending on the chipmaker. The benchmarks between the two chips are stronger with productivity benchmarks, with 13% better Geekbench 6 scores and 16% better in Cinebench 2024.

Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop chips struggled in gaming performance, even compared to Intel’s 14th generation chips. The benchmarks offered by AMD claim to beat the Intel Core Ultra 285K to varying degrees, although AMD said it could achieve 41% more frames in Final Fantasy XIV and 45% more in FarCry 6. Intel just debuted its new versions of the Arrow Lake architecture with the Core Ultra H- and HX series, and we need to see more apples-to-apples comparisons down the road.

The two new desktop chips will come out sometime in the first quarter of 2025. The laptop-centric HX3D has a more vague time window of the first half of 2025. We’ll have to wait several months before we see the chip on the slate of this year. of gaming laptops.

The other end of consumer desktops will also get some love with the new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards. If the names of these cards remind you of Nvidia’s latest, it’s because it’s intentional. The company said it is pushing the names to compete with the RTX 4070 and also align with the naming convention on AMD’s high-end CPUs. The first AMD Radeon RDNA 4 is intended to offer better ray tracing and AI processing capabilities with a confirmed 4nm process, not 3nm as previously rumored. Additionally, AMD said it plans to upgrade its AI upscaler from FSR 3.5 to FSR 4. That should offer better 4K upscaling.

There is not much to go on, but the chipmaker has promised to provide more details closer to the release, sometime in Q1 this year.

AMD’s Ryzen Z1 is one of the most popular RDNA 3 chips for laptops, and AMD has confirmed that the Ryzen Z2 is around the corner. The top-end Z2 Extreme, still based on RDNA 3, will have an 8-core, 16-thread configuration and a frequency of 5 GHz. The Z2 Extreme can also make a 15-35 W TDP compared to the regular Z2 at 15-30 W. The “extreme” part of the name is really present in the number of graphics cores-16 in total. Then there is the Z2 Go, a more limited chip with four cores, eight threads, and a max boost of 4.3 GHz. That last chip seems destined for the Lenovo Legion Go S portable PC.

The company dropped a few hints that Lenovo’s Legion Go, the Asus ROG Ally, and even Valve’s Steam Deck may be looking to go to the Z2 Extreme in 2025. The Steam Deck currently uses its custom chip based on the Zen architecture 2.

Gizmodo covers all the coolest and weirdest tech from the show floor CES 2025 in Las Vegas. Follow our live coverage here.