Despite being initially leaked before their proper CES 2025 keynote, AMD has finally announced the second generation if its processor for portable gaming and computing device, the Ryzen Z2 and as expected, the improvement shall give space for speculation that next-gen portable device are coming this year.
AMD announced three new Ryzen Z2 APUs designed specifically for gaming handhelds and these include the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, Ryzen Z2, and Ryzen Z2 Go.
Each APU targets different power levels and starting with the Ryzen Z2 Extreme features 8 cores (3 Zen 5 + 5 Zen 5c) and 16 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units, meanwhile the Ryzen Z2 has 8 Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA 3 Compute Units.
Finally, the newest member of the family and debuting the Ryzen Z2 Go is designed for budget-conscious gamers with 4 Zen 3+ cores and 12 RDNA 2 Compute Units.
Needless to say that the Ryzen Z2 Extreme will be the flagship of the Ryzen Z2 family and each individual will power target devices, AMD acknowledged directly that the Ryzen Z2 Go was specifically designed for the Legion Go S, the entry-level variant of the Lenovo Go device.
While there is no official words on device carrying this new CPU family from AMD, it confirmed that the Ryzen Z2 will be used in systems from ASUS, Lenovo, and Valve, which pretty much will have many gamers eyes anticipating if 2025 will mean the year of a proper Steam Deck follow-up.
AMD expect to have the Ryzen Z2 available for PC and electronic manufactures within Q1 2025.
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
I guess that I should circle as the most unrelated gaming news of CES 2025, but I guess is fair to include an announcement from Qualcomm regarding on its quest to grind in the AI and Microsoft’s Copilot without being an expensive investment from computer and power users.
With this, Qualcomm has unveiled its new Snapdragon X chip at CES 2025, aimed at bringing AI-powered computing to more affordable laptops and mini PCs.
The Snapdragon X chip features an 8-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU, 45 TOPS NPU performance, and an integrated GPU and also, it is expected to offer 167% faster performance and better power efficiency compared to its competitors.
In other words, Qualcomm sees an opportunity with entry-level computer powered up with Copilot.
A important aspect that many will take proper attention, is that according to Qualcomm, a Snapdragon X-equipped test PC lasted 106% longer while streaming Netflix than an Intel Core 5-powered notebook and it is a fair thing to say that this detail is important as battery life has been a persistent problem for Intel-based systems for years.
Qualcomm also announced it is bringing its Snapdragon chips to desktop PCs.
The chip will be available in budget-friendly Copilot+ PCs starting at $600, with manufacturers like Acer, ASUS, Dell Technologies, HP, and Lenovo on board.
The biggest announcement from Intel at their keyonote on CES 2025, was the second batch of the Intel Core Ultra 200 series processors, which are designed to be used on AI ready laptop computers and power high capacity mobile computers.
Of course, for our interest, this means that future laptops will benefit from enhanced gaming performance for this year 2025.
The 2025 Core Ultra 200 family incldes:
Core Ultra 200HX: Targeted at high-performance gaming laptops. It includes advanced features like overclocking capabilities and enhanced data lanes for maximum performance.
Core Ultra 200H: A middle ground option with integrated Intel Arc graphics, suitable for performance thin and light laptops.
Core Ultra 200U: Designed for budget-end systems and less demanding tasks, featuring Intel Graphics GPU.
Intel claims that the new processors offer double-digit performance improvements over previous generations in both single and multi-core workloads and specifically, the Core Ultra 200H series includes Intel Arc integrated graphics, providing more than 20% better GPU performance compared to previous models.
Also, these processors are designed to consume less power while maintaining high performance, making them ideal for gaming laptops and mainly, gaming on the go.
Talking about gaming, the combination of powerful CPU cores and advanced integrated graphics ensures a smooth and immersive gaming experience and again, taking for example the Core Ultra 200HX series, this specific CPI is designed to work seamlessly with discrete GPUs, providing maximum performance for gaming systems.
Intel says that it has addressed previous power management issues, ensuring that gaming laptops can deliver consistent performance without throttling and this take us to the other purpose of this family and it is housing an AI entity.
For Artificial Intelligence needs, Intel claims the processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) with up to 99 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) for enhanced AI capabilities significant gen-over-gen performance advancements in key areas like media processing and AI analytics and mobile graphics benchmark improvement via AI graphical computing.
The processors are expected to be available starting early Q1 2025 for the Core Ultra 200H series, and late Q1 2025 for the Core Ultra 200HX series.
As for partners, Intel has not yet disclosed specific partners for the Core Ultra 200 series processors. However, given Intel’s extensive history of collaborations, it’s likely that major PC manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus will be among the first to integrate these processors into their new laptops and desktops.
News from Computex Taipei is already coming in since the pandemic disallowed the event to be public. Now in the 2023 edition and an in-public return, the conversation about artificial intelligence continues with Nvidia.
