AMD isn't pulling any punches in gaming laptops. The company's latest plan announced over at CES 2025 is to take its beefiest 16-core/32-thread processor, whack loads more cache on the top, and run it at a laptop-friendly TDP of 54 W.
It's called the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D. It comes with a max boost clock of 5.4 GHz and 144 MB of L3 cache. It's a little bit slower than the desktop version, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D also just announced at CES, but really only a little bit. That desktop chip runs at 5.7 GHz and 170 W.
It really is just the desktop chip reborn for mobile, too. The same chiplet design with a laptop-friendly socket. A large package by laptop standards.
This chip follows on from the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, which we were impressed with in testing but never saw much of again. It is available in a couple of ROG Strix Scar 17 laptops, as we tested, but little else. Here's hoping that changes with this newer version and it's more widely available.
Though a beefy laptop chip will face other constraints. Thermals are going to be a challenge, and we don't yet know who will utilise this chip in a gaming laptop. It's a pretty extreme number, and might be less popular than some of the more sensible options available from AMD, including the new 16-core 9955HX, new 12-core 9850HX, new Ryzen AI Max, or one of the many Ryzen AI 300-series.
Speaking of the Ryzen AI 300-series, there are new Ryzen AI 7 and Ryzen AI 5 chips on the way. Here they are:
Those join the many Ryzen AI Max chips, including the top 16C/32T model with 40 (forty!) GPU compute units.
With so many options to choose from, some including beefy GPUs, AMD must be expecting a big uptick in gaming laptops stuffed with its chips. The dominant combination has long been an Intel CPU with an Nvidia GPU, though we've seen more of AMD's chips make it into the market in recent years. Not so much discrete GPUs, though, and AMD has nothing new to offer gaming laptops in this regard at CES.
