AMD unveils Ryzen AI Max chips to rival industry giants

The Ryzen AI Max series represents a major step forward for AI-powered computing, offering cutting-edge performance for creators, developers, and businesses

At the heart of its announcement at CES 2025, AMD rolled out its ground-breaking Ryzen AI Max chip line-up, marking a significant leap in AI-powered computing. The company touted the series as the "most advanced mobile x86 processor" ever created, designed to outperform leading chips from Intel, Apple, and Nvidia in key areas like performance, energy efficiency, and AI processing.

The Ryzen AI Max series builds on the Ryzen AI 300 family, offering critical upgrades such as increased core counts and a new unified memory architecture. These improvements are tailored for next-gen AI workloads, especially in Microsoft’s upcoming Copilot+ PCs. The chips are set to feature in a wide range of devices, including high-performance laptops, mobile workstations, and compact desktops, with major OEMs like Lenovo, HP, Acer, and Asus incorporating them into their upcoming models. Devices like the HP ZBook Ultra G1A mobile workstation and the Asus ROG Flow Z13 gaming laptop will debut with the new chips.

Rahul Tikoo, AMD's General Manager for Client Computing, emphasized the versatility of the Ryzen AI Max, claiming it redefines performance across different form factors—from portable laptops to powerful workstations. The series includes four models, each designed with both consumer and commercial versions, which integrate AMD's Ryzen Pro management and security features. The highest-end models come with up to 16 Zen 5 cores and up to 40 XDNA 3.5 GPU cores, a significant upgrade over last year’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 375. These chips also support higher clock speeds and thread counts, enhancing multitasking and processing capabilities.

One of the standout features of the Ryzen AI Max is its new unified memory architecture. This innovation links the CPU, GPU, and NPU (neural processing unit) to allocate up to 96GB of system memory to the GPU, improving performance in AI tasks. Combined with a memory bandwidth of 256GB/s, this setup offers unprecedented speed for mobile x86 systems, providing the best balance of power and efficiency for portable devices.

The Ryzen AI Max series also introduces a powerful NPU capable of up to 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS), elevating the chip’s ability to handle AI-intensive workloads. In performance tests, AMD demonstrated that the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 significantly outperformed Intel’s Core Ultra 9 288V across multiple 3D rendering benchmarks, including Cinebench and Blender. The Ryzen chip was also up to 86% faster than Apple’s 12-core M4 Pro in rendering tasks like Vray, showing clear advantages in both speed and efficiency.

In AI workloads, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 was shown to outperform Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090, delivering 2.2 times the performance in large language model tasks while consuming just 55 watts of power. In contrast, the RTX 4090 requires 450 watts, underscoring the Ryzen chip's superior energy efficiency.

AMD’s Ryzen AI Max series represents a major step forward for AI-powered computing, offering cutting-edge performance for creators, developers, and businesses. With advancements in processor design, memory architecture, and AI capabilities, AMD is setting a new standard for mobile computing, challenging the dominance of established players in the industry.