AMD Ryzen AI Max The chips were a huge surprise at CES 2025. They're essentially super-powered versions of the company's Ryzen AI hardware, with 16 CPU cores and 50 RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, along with a pool of 128GB of onboard RAM. AMD claims that Ryzen AI Max chips will deliver 2.6 times faster 3D rendering than the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, as well as 1.4 times better graphics performance.
Squint a little and you might think AMD is taking inspiration from Apple Silicon with its powerful processor cores, graphics and unified memory. But, according to Vice President Joe Macri, AMD was going towards this long before Apple. “We were creating APUs (chips that integrate processors and Radeon graphics), while Apple was using discrete graphics processors. They used our discrete graphics processors. So I don't think Apple came up with this idea.” AMD has also had a history of packing huge amounts of memory into Instinct GPUs for data centers.
Still, Macri gives Apple credit for proving that you don't need discrete graphics to sell people powerful computers. “A lot of people in the PC industry said, well, if you need graphics, it has to be discrete graphics, otherwise people will think it's bad graphics,” he said. “Apple has shown that consumers don't care what's inside the box. They really care about what the box looks like. They care about the screen, keyboard, mouse. They care about what she does.”
Thanks to the success of Apple Silicon, Macri was finally able to get permission to spend a “staggering” amount of money on developing Ryzen AI Max. “As we built APUs, I always knew, and I was always committed to building this big APU, that I could build a system that was smaller, faster, and could deliver much higher performance with the same power,” he said.
I briefly saw Ryzen AI Max in action while testing the latest ASUS ROG Flow Z13 at the AMD CES booth. I was able to play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart in 1080p at well over 60 frames per second, with plenty of graphical flourishes. It's hard to tell on such a small tablet screen, but overall performance looked on par with the base PlayStation 5 (albeit at a slightly lower resolution). AMD claims that Ryzen AI Max is also comparable to the 14-core Apple M4 Pro chip (which it also beats in the Vray test).
Ryzen AI Max systems will be released in the first and second quarters of the year, including the aforementioned ROG Flow Z13, as well as the HP ZBook Ultra G1a.