Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today debuted a laptop processor series that can run artificial intelligence models faster than some standalone graphics cards.

The company detailed the chips at CES alongside several other additions to its product lineup. Those other processors are optimized for gaming laptops, handheld gaming devices and desktops. 

Laptop-hosted LLMs 

The Ryzen AI Max Series is a new family of AI-optimized laptop chips that includes four processors on launch. According to AMD, each chip combines a central processing unit with a neural processing unit and an integrated graphics processing unit.

The product family’s flagship processor, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, includes 16 cores based on AMD’s latest Zen 5 CPU architecture. CPUs include a branch prediction mechanism that anticipates what task an application will perform next and completes the task in advance to save time. Zen 5’s branch prediction mechanism can predict two code paths, or future application workflows, instead of the usual one, to boost performance.

The Ryzen AI Max+ 395’s onboard GPU has 40 compute units, the graphics card equivalent of a core. The compute units are based on RDNA 3.5. It’s a version of RDNA 3, a GPU architecture introduced by AMD in 2022, that is made using a high-performance version of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s four-nanometer node.

Laptops powered by the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 can be equipped with up to 128 gigabytes of memory. By default, the memory is shared by the chip’s CPU, GPU and NPU. Optionally, users can allocate the bulk of the RAM to the GPU in order to boost the performance it provides for AI models.

In an internal test, AMD used the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 to run a version of the Llama 70B large language model. The company says that its new chip provided 2.2 times better performance than Nvidia Corp.’s standalone RTX 4090 GPU using less power. Usually, standalone GPUs are significantly faster than their CPU-integrated counterparts.

The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is rolling out alongside three other Ryzen AI Max Series processors that have a similar architecture, but lower core counts and clock speeds. The chips are available in both consumer and enterprise versions. The latter editions ship with AMD’s Pro software, which provides cybersecurity and troubleshooting tools for information technology teams.

New gaming chips

Laptops geared towards running video games usually include a standalone GPU. For such machines, AMD is rolling out the a line of processors called the Ryzen 9000HX Series. Because they’re designed to work with a standalone GPU, the chips in the series don’t include their own integrated graphics card.

The flagship processor in the product lineup is the Ryzen 9955 HX3D. It features 16 cores like the AI-optimized Ryzen AI Max+ 395, but its maximum frequency is 300 MHz higher for a total of 5.4Ghz. Additionally, the Ryzen 9955 HX3D has a significantly larger 128-megabyte cache.

Multiple form factors

Alongside its new high-end laptop chips, AMD introduced three other product families at CES today.

The Ryzen 200 is a set of entry-level laptop processors based on the company’s previous-generation Zen 4 chip architecture. The most capable chip in the series includes eight CPU cores, a GPU based on the RDNA 3 architecture and an NPU that can perform up to 16 trillion operations per second.

For desktops, AMD is launching two new chips known as the Ryzen 9950X3D and 9900X3D. They feature 16 and 12 Zen 5 CPU cores, respectively. They will roll out alongside the Ryzen Z2, a processor series designed to power handheld gaming devices that combines up to eight Zen 5 cores with an RDNA 3.5 graphics card. 

Image: AMD