AMD’s Powerful Radeon 9000 Gaming CPUs Are Coming to Laptops

Image AMDNot to let Nvidia have all the fun, AMD’s CPU slate is drastically expanding at the top of 2025. Team Red has gaming and graphics on the mind with the long-awaited Zen 5, Ryzen 9 X3D chips to take the top slot for high-powered gaming PCs. After that, the all-new RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9700 cards are meant to compete against Nvidia’s mid-range offerings, though we’ll need to wait longer for any hint if AMD wants to compete in the realm of high-end GPUs.

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

Fans of Team Red have been chomping at the bit to get their look at AMD’s new top-end gaming CPU. The top-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D has been beefed up from the Zen 4. It promises more than 20% better in-game performance from games like Hogwarts Legacy and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. However, you won’t see much difference between the two in a game like Black Myth Wukong or Cyberpunk 2077, according to the chipmaker. The benchmarks between the two chips are more stark with productivity benchmarks, with 13% better Geekbench 6 scores and 16% better in Cinebench 2024.

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

Both new desktop chips will come out sometime in the first quarter of 2025. The laptop-centric 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 slate of gaming laptops.

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

There is not much to go on, but the chipmaker promised to provide more details closer to release, sometime in Q1 this year.

AMD’s Ryzen Z1 is one of the more popular RDNA 3 chips for handhelds, and AMD confirmed that the Ryzen Z2 is around the corner. The top-end Z2 Extreme, still based on RDNA 3, will have an 8-core, 16-thread configuration and a 5 GHz frequency. The Z2 Extreme can also do a 15-35 W TDP compared to the regular Z2 at 15-30 W. The “extreme” part of the name is really present 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 a 4.3 GHz max boost. That last chip seems destined for the Lenovo Legion Go S handheld PC.

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

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