At CES 2025 today, AMD debuted its new Ryzen 9 9955HX3D mobile 3D V cache-based processor, alongside the 9950X3D and 9900X3D desktop chips. It also unveiled Ryzen 200 series CPUs for the mainstream.
Besides those, AMD also expanded its Ryzen AI 300 series APU lineup today that so far comprised of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375, 370, and 365 and their corresponding PRO counterparts. On one hand, the company is bringing more affordable AI chips with the new Ryzen AI 7 (PRO) 350 and Ryzen AI 5 (PRO) 340. On the other hand, it is also debuting more powerful Ryzen AI Max and Max+ SKUs.
In case you have not been following, an NPU needs to do over 40 TOPS which is the threshold for qualifying Microsoft"s Copilot+ PC requirement. Thus the newly released Ryzen 200 series for example does not qualify since they top out at just 16 TOPS.
Going forward, the company is dividing its AI PC chips into three classes: Halo, Premium, and Advanced. The new Max and Max+ SKUs will comprise the Halo segment, the Ryzen AI 9 will be the Premium tier, and finally, the Ryzen AI 7/5 will belong to the Advanced class.
The new Max+ parts are being touted very highly as AMD claims performance leadership over the likes of Nvidia RTX 4090, Apple M4 Pro, and Intel Ultra 9 288V across various tasks. For example, the company says that its new Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU is on average 2.6 times faster than Intel 288V in rendering and around 1.4 times faster in (synthetic) gaming.
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Compared against Apple"s 14-core M4 Pro, AMD expects better performance on the Max+ 395 in rendering with Blender, Corona, and V-Ray, with V-Ray showing the most favorable result.
Finally, the Max+ 395 has been compared against Nvidia RTX 4090 where AMD once again claims victory as the Max+ is said to be 2.2 times faster in AI processing (in tokens/second) on LM Studio. The company boasts about the 395 here claiming it as "the World"s first Copilot PC+ processor to run 70B LLM".
AMD added that its Max APU can allocate up to 96 GB of memory to the integrated 40 CU RDNA 3.5 graphics portion out of the total 128 GB of memory that is available to it.
If you are wondering how the new Ryzen AI Max+ APUs are so powerful, that"s because it has 16 Zen 5 cores on the CPU side, just like the Ryzen 9955HX(3D), and it also packs 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units (CUs) (not to be confused with the new RDNA 4), and finally a 50 TOPS capable XDNA 2 NPU.
What is interesting with the Halo Copilot+ (Max and Max+) class of AMD Ryzen AI processors is that these SKUs feature a "new memory interface" which the company refers to as "Unified Coherent Memory Architecture." Thanks to this new interface, the Ryzen AI Max and Max+ APUs enjoy a memory bandwidth of up to 256 GB/s.
The image above shows the full Ryzen AI 300 Max and Max+ lineup as well as their availabilities.
Aside from performance data of the Max+ APU, AMD has also shared how it expects the Ryzen AI 7 350 to compete against Intel and Qualcomm. According to the provided figures, the company expects the 350 APU to be up to 49% better than the Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100, and up to 78% faster than Intel Core Ultra 7 258V.
You can check the full specs and availability of the Ryzen AI 350 and 340 in the image above.