Fans of GPUs will be disappointed, as CPUs were in the spotlight at Las Vegas.
Rumors abounded that AMD would be announcing one product or another at CES. The Consumer Electronic Show, which takes place every year at the beginning of January in Las Vegas, Nevada, is in a way the metronome of consumer electronics to come over the course of the year. New products galore, but nothing from AMD in the world of graphics cards, no new GPUs. All the American company's attention was focused on processors.
The complete Ryzen AI 400 series line-up © AMD
First and foremost, AMD confirmed the launch of a new Ryzen AI line-up. The 400 series is the successor to the 300 series, but it's not really a revolution. AMD has retained the same architectures for the CPU, GPU and even the NPU: we're therefore left with processors combining Zen 5, RDNA 3.5 and XDNA 2 cores. Nevertheless, seven new chips are presented, with the primary objective of giving the 300 series a facelift. The slide above illustrates this perfectly, with small improvements across the range. The strongest models in the new 400 series are the Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, which feature a more powerful NPU than the rest of the range: 60 TOPS and 55 TOPS respectively. They're also the only ones to feature a whopping 12 Zen 5 CPU cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. Power will be monstrous.
The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is even more powerful than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D © AMD
Alongside this new range, AMD is taking advantage of CES to introduce two new processors for its Ryzen AI Max+. There's no question here of dethroning the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and its 16 CPU cores, but rather of pleasing manufacturers and users by integrating the Ryzen AI Max+ 392 and Ryzen AI Max+ 388: chips that retain the powerful Radeon 8060S integrated graphics solution and its 40 RDNA 3.5 computing units, but reduce the power of the CPU part (12 and 8 Zen 5 cores respectively) in order to lower prices. Last but not least, AMD unveiled its next desktop processor, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. This is a simple variant of the very popular Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but it allows AMD to claim that it "makes the most powerful processor dedicated to video games even better".The main improvement of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D over the Ryzen 7 9800X3D lies in the boost frequency, which increases from 400 MHz to 5.6 GHz all the same.
These chips are scheduled for launch in the first and second quarters of the year, but AMD has remained tight-lipped about exact release dates, and has not given any pricing details either.
