Ryzen AI Max: AMD is working hard on its new series of mobile processors

For those who observe the field of processors for laptops over the last few years, the trend that emerges is clear: the processor must be capable of doing everything, from rendering 3D up to artificial intelligence tasks, without showing any signs of weakness. The tidal wave of new Snapdragon branded laptops from Qualcomm could make us believe that the future is exclusive to ARM architectures… However, the market share of x86 systems is still overwhelming, and recent advances in efficiency energy – carried by Lunar Lake and potentially continued by the generation Arrow Lake-S – clearly show that the long-standing players, Intel and AMD, have not said their last word.

There team red has been making its priority known for several years – getting the maximum performance out of its mobile chips, especially in the field of video games. The strength of its iGPUs no longer needs to be proven, and AMD intends to strengthen its reputation with the new generation of Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen AI Max Plus processors.

On paper, the numbers are dizzying: its most advanced SKU, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, displays 16 Zen5 cores with 32 threads with a boost frequency of 5.1 GHz maximum, but also (and above all) 40 AMD graphics cores RDNA 3.5 – in addition to the inevitable 50 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) of its NPU module dedicated to artificial intelligence tasks. The stated goal is clear – to catch Apple's advances on the capabilities of rendering in 3D of his home chip M4while keeping a distance in advance with Intel and its future Core Ultra 200H… Which will, one imagines, maintain an advantage in terms of energy efficiency.

All iterations of the Strike Lake chips can consume up to 120W under full load (!); suffice to say that you will have to keep your charger close at hand if you intend to exploit all their power. Laptops featuring Ryzen AI Max processors will be released in the first part of 2025 – Asus has already entered the arena by unveiling its new Flow Z13 hybrid gaming tablet on the CES showfloor.

AMD also announced new processors intended to be coupled with a mobile graphics card: the Ryzen 7 9955HX3D, 9955HX and 9850HX CPUs, grouped under the name Fire Range, will use the 3D V-Cache construction used by their desktop equivalent 9950X3Din order to improve performance by optimizing heat dissipation.