AMD Dazzles CES Crowd With 9950X3D Desktop CPU and Ryzen AI Max Mobile Processors

At CES 2025, AMD is launching many new CPUs, and the most interesting ones are the high-end AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D desktop CPU, and the AMD Ryzen AI MAX and MAX Pro for laptops.

The 16-core 9950X3D with 144MB of cache (!!) is a nice addition to the 7950X3D desktop CPU and offers an average 8% additional performance (across 40 games) over the already super-fast 7950X3D, that’s according to numbers supplied by AMD. There’s also a more affordable Ryzen 9 9900X3D with 12 cores, which may have a slightly better performance/price ratio.

We expected independent benchmarks to confirm this positioning. From there, prospective buyers can look at the performance/price ratio, often the endgame for desktop CPUs, since power efficiency is not as important for these users.

The Ryzen AI series is aimed at “AI laptops” powered by Microsoft’s Copilot, which has performance requirements to get into the Copilot club. As a result, AMD introduced the Ryzen AI 300 and Ryzen AI Max processors, the latter being the most interesting as they target creators and higher-end use cases.

These use the latest CPU core design and come with various numbers of CPU and GPU cores to target the desired price points. You can have between 6 and 16 CPU cores and 16 to 40 GPU cores, which is a massive number for AMD products. The AI capabilities are similar for all variants, with 50 TOPS (Trillion operations per second), and that’s a high number, with competitors often showing 13-30 TOPS.

With a TDP of 45-120W, we’ll have to see what kind of chassis these processors will be used in, but that’s not your ultramobile laptop, but more likely various (relatively) light workstations and creative laptops.

AMD touted advantageous internal benchmarks, claiming up to 400% faster Blender rendering than Intel’s Core Ultra 9 288V processor. Overall, the technical specifications and claimed performance are impressive, and this is an excellent technical foundation for upcoming AI laptops and mobile workstations.

The Ryzen AI Max processors series also comes in an AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO variant, referring to AMD’s PRO technologies for enterprises that revolve around various aspects of computer and data security or fleet management.

Filed in Computers. Read more about AMD, CES 2025, CPU, Desktop Pc, Laptops, Processors and Semiconductors.