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As expected, AMD kicked off its CES 2025 keynote starting with an expected announcement and it is more X3D or 3D-Cahce ready CPU variants of the current Ryzen Zen 5 family and now, it is the turn of the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X and the little brother Ryzen 9 9900X, respectively with Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D.
Let’s start on what gamers are looking for and yes, AMD officially announced the X3D cache ready variant of the Ryzen 9 9950X as the Ryzen 9950X3D, which will get gamers a noticeable boost on gaming performance.
The Ryzen 9 99050X3D features 16 Zen 5 cores with a Max Boost frequency of 5.7GHz with 2 V-Cache, one specifically for AMD’s 3D-Cache and the other for the regular use of Zen 5 core usage, sharing a memory space of 144MB.
MD says the 9950X3D should be around 8 percent faster on average than the previous 7950X3D, based on benchmarks run on 40 games at 1080p. The gaming performance should be similar to the 9800X3D, with AMD claiming it’s within 1 percent. AMD even claims the 9950X3D is 20 percent faster than Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K in those same games
With this, AMD is going after Intel’s Core 285K, calling it “the world’s best gaming processor” and the “new king for content creators and actually, it was acknowledged that both gaming and content creators are the target audience with the bold claim the 9950X3D is 20 percent faster than Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K.
Remember that X3D variants of Ryzen CPU doesn’t see much improvement of their predecessors for general productivity like Word Processors, Presentation, non-GPU assisted graphical designs even non-graphical software engineering.
For those in a new to go beyond Ryzen 7 9800X3D but not enough budget for the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Ryzen 9 9900X3D also makes its apprearance.
The Ryzen 9 9900X3D will include 12 Zen cores with24 threads, a 5.5GHz max boost, 140MB of cache, and a 120-watt TDP and with this, AMD said the cache is now less sensitive to high temperatures, allowing the CPU to boost to higher frequencies and deliver better performance in both gaming and creator tasks.
The new Zen 9 3D-Cache ready variants of the Zen 5 CPU family will be available starting March 2025, but prices were not immediately announced.
“Strix Halo” and “Fire Range” no more
The second announcement regarding CPU it aimed for mobile gaming or gaming laptop and once internally knew as “Strix Halo” and “Fire Range”, where announced today respectively as Ryzen AI Max family and the Ryzen HX/HX3D family.
Starting with AI Max family and more or less taking the queue of both Apple with the M processors and Qualcomm with Snapdragon X family, AMD is taking the best of both gaming and AI world with these two processors.
The Ryzen AI Max can have configuration of up to 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, and a new memory interface with 256GB per second of bandwidth and meanwhile, the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 (the high end variant), as over 1.4x the graphics performance and 2.6x the 3D rendering performance of Intel’s highest-end Lunar Lake chip, the Intel Core 9 288V.
These specs in theory, makes a high end laptop beating a MacBook Pro built with a Apple M4 Pro, which tells you that laptops built with these processors are for a mix of gaming and productivity.
Finally the former Fire Range project, was announced as the family that includes the new HX- and X3D which its design will have them as a discrete processing units instead of discrete GPU.
The family includes the Ryzen 9 9850HX, Ryzen 9 9955HX and the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D which is obvious to say which one include 144MB of 3D-Cache or X3D and this will power the high-end gaming laptop for this year.
The processors are expected to be available in the first half of 2025 and are aimed at users who need powerful computing for gaming, content creation, and AI workloads
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