AMD’s powerful Radeon 9000 gaming processors come to laptops

Image AMDN Not to let Nvidia have any fun, AMD’s CPU slate is expanding dramatically in early 2025. Team Red thinks gaming and graphics with the long-awaited Zen 5, Ryzen 9 X3D chips to take the top spot – powered gaming PCs. Next, the all-new Radeon RX 9700 cards based on RDNA 4 are designed to compete with Nvidia’s mid-range offerings, although we’ll have to wait longer for any hint if AMD wants to compete in the graphics space high-end processors.

AMD’s two new processors include the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D. The first is a 12-core, 24-thread configuration with 5.5 Ghz maximum boost and 140 MB cache. The new top class for AMD consumer processors includes 16 cores and 32 threads with a frequency of 5.7 Ghz and 144 MB cache. We’re particularly interested in the all-new Ryzen 9 9955HX3D laptop chip. It has the same thread, core and TDP as the high-end desktop chip

Team Red fans have been hoping to see AMD’s new top gaming processor. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 9950X3D is boosted by Zen 4. It promises more than 20% better gaming performance from games like The Hogwarts legacy and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. However, you won’t see much of a difference between the two in a game like The Wukong Black Myth or Cyberpunk 2077according to the chip manufacturer. Benchmarks between the two chips are brighter with performance metrics, with 13% better results in Geekbench 6 and 16% better in Cinebench 2024.

Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop chips have struggled with gaming performance, even compared to Intel’s 14th generation chips. AMD’s proposed benchmarks claim to beat the Intel Core Ultra 285K to varying degrees, although AMD said it could get 41% more frames in Final Fantasy XIV and 45% more in Far Cry 6. Intel just debuted its new versions of the Arrow Lake architecture with the Core Ultra H- and HX-series, and we’ll have to see more apples-to-apples comparisons down the road.

Both new desktop chips will be released sometime in the first quarter of 2025. The laptop-oriented HX3D has a more vague time window of the first half of 2025. We’ll have to wait many months before we see the chip in this year’s laptop lineup for games.

The other end of consumer desktops will also be pleased with the new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards. If the names of these cards remind you of Nvidia’s latest, that’s because it’s intentional. The company said it wanted the names to compete with the RTX 4070 and also align with AMD’s high-end processor naming convention. The first AMD Radeon RDNA 4 is designed to offer better ray tracing and AI processing capabilities with a confirmed 4nm process, not 3nm as previously rumored. Additionally, AMD said it plans to update its AI upscaler from FSR 3.5 to FSR 4. This should offer better 4K upscaling.

There’s not much to go on, but the chipmaker has promised to provide more details closer to launch, sometime in Q1 this year.

AMD’s Ryzen Z1 is one of the most popular RDNA 3 chips for notebooks, and AMD has confirmed that Ryzen Z2 is around the corner. The top-of-the-line Z2 Extreme, still based on RDNA 3, will have an 8-core, 16-thread configuration and a frequency of 5 GHz. The Z2 Extreme can also hit 15-35 W TDP compared to the regular Z2 at 15-30 W. The “extreme” part of the name really comes through in the number of graphics cores – 16 in total. Then there’s the Z2 Go, a more limited chip with four cores, eight threads and 4.3 GHz maximum boost. The latest chip appears to be destined for the Lenovo Legion Go S notebook.

The company dropped a few hints that Lenovo’s Legion Go, Asus ROG Ally, and even Valve’s Steam Deck might want to move to the Z2 Extreme in 2025. Steam Deck currently uses its custom chip based on the Zen 2 architecture.

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