AMD’s master card for powerful laptops

A few years ago, the market was much simpler to analyze. We had Intel, the king of processors. NVIDIA, the king of graphics cards. And AMD, the cheaper and worse alternative of the two protagonists in both categories. But we underestimated one thing: how important its APU concept, which defines a mobile chip integrating both a CPU and a GPU, would become over the years.

If the Ryzen revolution powered by Lisa Su was the turning point for AMD, we cannot deny the importance that the powerful graphics part of SoCs has taken on over the years. And while the new category of portable console PCs is exploding thanks to it, the red team seems to be inspired by it by unveiling its new Ryzen AI Max and Max Pro chips at CES 2025.

Ryzen AI Max, for phenomenal integrated power

The Ryzen AI Max represents a new category of chips for AMD. But to explain them, it is better to first see the power advanced by these four new chips intended for portable and compact computers.

Up to 16 Zen 5 cores on the processor part, up to 40 Compute Units in RDNA 3.5 on the graphics part, up to 50 TOPS for the XDNA 2 NPU part, and up to 256 GB/s of bandwidth for the memory interface. A chip for a power monster, which seeks to rub shoulders with the Nvidia CPU + GPU combo well known to gaming and creative PCs with a platform where everything is integrated. All with a total TDP which does not exceed 120W.

It’s at least difficult to determine the real power of this platform, since the comparisons provided by AMD are… a bit dishonest. If we can see up to 2.6 times more performance in 3D rendering, the SoC here is compared to a Core Ultra 9 288V far from being equivalent. The same goes for graphics performance, improved to 1.4 times more powerful. The comparison with the 14-core MacBook Pro is perhaps a little more logical, and the figures given are encouraging.

AMD seems to be betting as much as possible on artificial intelligence calculations, and does not hesitate to say that the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is capable of going 2.2 times faster than a mobile GeForce RTX 4090 with 24 GB of VRAM on an LLM of 70 billion, for up to 87%M less TDP. True, but we also know that this AI Max+ is capable of using up to 96 GB of shared RAM, so it’s difficult to establish whether the comparison is truly balanced here.

Still, this new fully integrated SoC at its maximum power has something exhilarating, and we can’t wait to compare it to the usual Ryzen + GeForce pairing that is the most popular today. Products like the HP ZBook Ultra G1a or the new Asus ROG Flow Z13 from 2025 will integrate it to create ever thinner and ever more efficient formats.

Proof that the real interest of this new platform will be in the products that it will allow to create. If the SoC will be available between the first and second quarters of 2025 for manufacturers, we may not see a lot of different products for a few more months. Here, we dream of seeing a new Steam Machine that would take advantage of these Ryzen AI Max.