Broadly speaking, AMD’s firsts for this year can be divided into the following areas: High-performance APUs for computers gaming desktops, high-performance APUs for high-power laptops, more balanced chips for multipurpose equipment and processors for portable consoles based on Windows 11.
Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D: desktop muscle
Starting with the first of these four categories (lax as they may be), the new Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D take the baton from the Ryzen 7 9800X3D to update the highest part of the catalog, promising to surpass the performance of the most powerful Arrow Lake by up to a 20%. These processors are equipped with 12 and 16 cores, respectively, and have a maximum of 144 MB of cache.
Although owners of one of these chips will obviously pair them with a high-end graphics card, they are standard APUs, so they also have their own integrated GPU based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
Its launch is scheduled for the first quarter of this year.
Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo”: laptops gaming and workstations with unified memory, lots of power and thinner designs than normal
On the other hand, and making the leap to the laptop segment, the new Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” are presented as an interesting evolution, mainly because due to their design they propose equipment gaming and particularly light and thin workstations, very far from the current concept.
To do this, they use an extraordinarily powerful integrated GPU, since each of these processors has an RDNA 3.5 graphics unit with 40 cores, bringing its performance closer to that of an independent graphics card of some magnitude but without the usual impact in terms of space, cooling and consumption.
Available in Max, Pro and base versions with up to 16 cores and 32 processing threads, the new APUs promise to render up to 84% faster than Apple’s M4 Pro processor and more than double (x2.2) the AI performance of a GeForce RTX 4090, but with drastically lower consumption.
How has AMD managed to make such a big leap using an APU without the assistance of a separate graphics card? One of the reasons is unified memory management. A laptop with 128 GB of RAM will be able to dedicate up to 96 GB just for the integrated GPUwhich should give a huge boost not only to laptops gamingbut also to machines dedicated to working with extremely heavy multimedia and AI loads.
The launch of the Strix Halo family will take place this quarter.
Ryzen 9000HX “Fire Range”: maximum power for laptops gaming with Zen 5 and 3D V-Cache
More oriented towards video games, and particularly towards those laptops that will inevitably mount a dedicated GPU, the Ryzen 9000HX are described by AMD as the best processor for gaming and content creation.
With a maximum of 16 Zen 5-based cores and second-generation 3D V-Cache memory, they are largely derived from the desktop Ryzen 9000, but are tailored to work within the limitations of the portable factor. This implies the adoption of a design chiplet standard and mount using BGA solders, otherwise offering up to 16 processing cores and 93 MB of L3 cache, as well as a fully auxiliary integrated GPU, based on RDNA 2 and with only 2 CUs.
AMD has not clearly indicated when the first laptops will go on sale, which should arrive during the first half of 2025.
Ryzen AI 200 and 300: RDNA 3.5 and Copilot+ for generalist laptops
The new ones Ryzen AI 200 and 300For their part, they make up a very extensive list of 15 new processors between base and Pro versions. They are aimed at general equipment but are very interesting due to their particular design, which in the case of the Ryzen AI 300 combines Zen 5 and Zen cores 5c with an RDNA 3.5 graphics unit compatible with Copilot+ (the Ryzen AI 200 do not seem to have this last luxury).
Perhaps illustrating where the industry stands, AMD isn’t just comparing these processors to their Intel counterparts, it’s also putting them head-to-head with the Qualcomm X Plus X1P-42-100, which it officially beats by a 30% margin. in the benchmarks used by AMD.
They will be available from the second quarter of 2025.
Ryzen Z2: new APUs for portable consoles
Finally, AMD has unveiled a new APU for those machines that we already know informally as portable consoles with Windows 11. It is called Ryzen Z2 and, to the surprise of quite a few, for now it will not arrive on the Steam Deck, although it will a large number of new machines that will be announced during CES. The Acer Nitro Blaze have been two of the earliest risers.
The Ryzen Z2 family is based on three reasonably differentiated processors: the Z2 Go, with 4/8 CPU and 12-core RDNA 2 GPU; a standard Z2 that swaps the CPU for an 8/16 design moves the GPU to the RDNA 3.5 architecture; and finally a Z2 Extreme that concentrates the improvements in the graphics unit, with a total of 16 cores (also RDNA 3.5).
According to AMD, “systems powered by Ryzen Z2” will hit stores this quarter.
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