AMD made several announcements at the 58th CES, set to officially kick off on Tuesday, January 7, 2025. The company unveiled six new CPUs, including the Ryzen 300 series, which is designed for AI PCs and features clock rates from 4.9 to 5.1 GHz and six to 16 cores. AMD also introduced its Max series CPUs for AI PCs and updated its RDNA architecture for GPUs, which will be used in its Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. Additionally, AMD announced its Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, which features a boost capability to 5.7 GHz and 16 Zen 5 cores, and its Fire Range HX3D mobile processor, which is designed for gaming and content creation.
The 58th Consumer Electronics Conference (CES) is being held at the big tent show in Las Vegas, where last year it attracted over 138,000 attendees. Hoping for the same or more this year, exhibitors that could afford the sky-high costs of displaying their wares brought out everything they could carry to show the throngs of curious and hungry buyers.
AMD understood that and came prepared with six new CPUs, an updated RDNA for its GPUs, and a tip of the hat to the Instinct AI GPUs. The company also declared that Epyc is the top CPU option for hyperscalers.
AMD showed seven new 2XX series Ryzen (3 to 9) CPUs with clock rates from 4.7 GHz to 5.2 GHZ, four to eight cores, and 12MB to 24MB of cache in 15W to 54W- packages—all available in Q2’25.
The company also introduced its Max series CPUs for AI PCs.
The AMD Ryzen 300 series is AMD’s answer to Intel and Qualcomm for the illusive but much-talked-about AI PC.
AMD has four AI PC CPUs in the Ryzen 300 series with clock rates from 4.9 to 5.1 GHz, six to 16 cores, 22MB to 80MB of cache, and 16 to 40 graphics cores, all running at 45W to 120W and rated at 50 TOPS. They will be available in Q1 and Q2 ’25.
Idle hands are the devil’s tools, so AMD and its partners have created something to do with your hands, something you can hold in public or private and entertain yourself for hours, with handheld gaming devices powered by Ryzen Z2 series processors.
And a couple of new AIBs are coming too—the Radeon RX 9070 XT and its admiring little brother, the RX 9070, which, sadly, will never grow up to be an XT.
The Radeon RX 9070 series must be pretty cool boards—I can just imagine the fans admiring the fans.
Those AIBs and the hand warmers will come with AMD’s latest rendition of its popular Fidelity FX ML-powered upscaling technology. It was developed for AMD’s RDNA 4, provides high quality (up to 4K), has enhanced performance when used in conjunction with AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), and comes with AMD’s Anti-Lag 2, which is much better at not lagging than that old Anti-Lag 1.
The RX 9070 series will be built in TSMC’s popular 4nm process in Taiwan, just 100 miles from the less popular China. RDNA 4 will appear in all AMD 2nd-gen AI accelerators, 3rd-gen ray-tracing acceleration, and AMD’s 2nd-gen Radiance Display Engine. RDNA 4 will, says AMD, also bring AI compute capability and (high, better, good…?) media encoding quality.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is sold out everywhere, is one of the most popular gaming CPUs since Threadripper. For those poor souls who didn’t get to the store in time and missed getting a 7800X3D, AMD has good news for you—the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Get one of these babies, and all those so-called friends of yours who waved their 7800X3D in your face will have to go home with head hung low, feeling beaten and stupid. Just watch eBay light up with gently used 7800X3D processors.
The Ryzen 9000 comes with a boost capability to 5.7 GHz, 16 Zen 5 cores, 76MB to 144MB total cache, and 2nd-gen V-Cache. Zowie!
In benchmarks, AMD ran against the formidable 7950X3D; the 9950X3D beat it by as much as 158% (in the game Counter-Strike), and it crushed Intel’s Core 9 285K so badly we can’t in clear conscious publish the results.
And on the heels of the 9900 series comes the new, amazing, all-new HX3D Fire Range, which AMD exclaims is nothing less than “the world’s best gaming and content-creation mobile processor.”
Snuggled in the 9900 series but with a “50” number, the Fire Range HX3D comes in three versions: 9955H3D, 9955HX, and the diminutive but hearty 9850HX. They have 16, 16, and 12 cores, respectively, run at 5.4 and 5.2 GHz, come equipped with 144MB, 80MB, and 76MB of cache, and, strangely, all draw W. You can get one (maybe, if you sleep out front of the store) in the first half of 2025 (dress warmly and take a thermos of vegetable soup).
You’re going to hear more (a lot more) about these new processors over the coming weeks and months to the point where you will be able to repeat the specs in your sleep, a source of endless amusement for your partner and the cats.
Meanwhile, here in Hungary, we are still picking up and selling the remnants of the set designs from the Alien: Romulus movie, which actually used AMD processors for the final post rendering and a few of the ray-traced scenes.
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