AMD is trying to give Nvidia’s long-rumored laptop CPUs a run for their money before they’re even out the door. To do this, AMD is making its most powerful processor with the latest Ryzen AI Halo chips that—hopefully—won’t be a no-show like its recent Ryzen AI 400 laptop CPUs.
The newly revealed Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 chip seems like a beast, at least on paper. The main draw is the newer Zen 5 CPU, which features 16 cores and 32 threads with a boost clock speed of 5.2GHz. However, the new chip has the same old RDNA 3.5 GPU microarchitecture that’s inside the previous-generation Ryzen AI Max+ 395. That Radeon 8065S graphics chip includes 40 compute units (the name AMD gives to its core clusters). It should also get a small boost with up to 160GB of possible VRAM (video random access memory), pushing the GPU memory further than before. Without AMD’s latest RDNA 4 GPU microarchitecture, it’s hard to call it a huge jump in possible performance compared to the Ryzen Max+ 300 series. AMD claims the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 is its first x86 processor that can run a 300 billion parameter AI model all by itself. AMD also promoted two other versions of the same APU (accelerated processing unit, which combines CPU and GPU capabilities). There’s a Ryzen AI Max Pro 490 with 12 cores and 24 threads, plus a Ryzen AI Max Pro 485 with eight cores and 16 threads. The lower-spec models use a smaller GPU with only 32 compute units. © AMD The reason why AMD’s last generation of Strix Halo chips became so popular wasn’t necessarily because of AI capabilities but rather because of their surprisingly capable graphics performance. This year, AMD expanded the lineup with a few toned-down Strix Halo processors specifically for gaming and creative-centric devices. The side effect of the AI-induced RAM crisis is that several companies cancelled gaming handhelds that were supposed to feature those toned-down processors.
