AMD's New Ryzen 9000 Desktop PC chips for Gaming and Creating
Photo: AMDAMD is jumping further into the future with upgrades to its Ryzen consumer desktop CPUs. Meanwhile, there are also big moves happening in artificial intelligence with the release of its newest Ryzen AI 300 chips, meant to power a future wave of AI-enabled laptops.
The 9600X is already being eyed as a go-to for mainstream gamers, and early benchmarks suggest strong performance-per-watt. If you're putting together a budget-conscious build with a mid-tier GPU like the RX 7700 XT, that chip makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, the 9700X and 9900X sit in the classic enthusiast sweet spot — great for high-refresh 1440p gaming and productivity workloads, especially for folks juggling OBS, Premiere, and gaming at the same time.
The 9950X, with its full-fat 16 cores, is the obvious flagship, and a bit of a flex. It's almost overkill for gaming — unless you're also compiling Unreal Engine builds in the background or running a local AI model. But that’s the point. It’s a chip that dares others to match it, and in performance-per-watt and platform efficiency, it looks like AMD is pulling ahead again.
The new mobile chips, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365, offer up to 12-cores and 24-threads, with boost frequencies above 5 GHz. The mobile chips come with Radeon 890M and Radeon 880M respectively, compatibility for faster USB 4 connections, and promises of up to a peak 50 TOPS (Tera Operations per Second) from its NPU. Copilot Plus PCs powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X will deliver 45 TOPS, while offerings from Intel currently sit around 11 TOPS. Many factors can affect AI app performance, and TOPS is one increasingly popular measurement.
"AI is our number one priority, and we're at the beginning of a very exciting time for the industry as AI transforms virtually every business, improves our quality of life, and reshapes every part of the computing market," AMD CEO Lisa Su said while announcing the new chips at Computex in Taiwan on Monday.
AMD's newest chips, and its Ryzen AI line in particular, represent the latest in a wave of new PCs flooding the market, designed to perform increasingly complex AI-related tasks being built into apps, video games and operating systems. Microsoft announced its Copilot Plus PC initiative last month, promoting new laptops and an added Copilot key for PC keyboards.
AMD has been bolstering its AI offerings though, integrating NPUs into its latest Ryzen Pro line of chips, which promise 16 dedicated NPU TOPS. Now, its Ryzen AI line is taking those capabilities a step further.
AMD also announced upgrades for its EPYC server and workstation chips, promising better performance for AI-powered tasks, when it launches later this year. The company is also planning upgrades for its Instinct MI325X accelerator, a competitor to NVIDIA's popular AI server GPUs, which are planned for Q4 2024.
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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. His stories and their insights have moved markets, changed how companies see themselves and given readers a unique view into how some of the world’s most powerful brands operate. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.
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