AMD announces ‘Fire Range’ and Ryzen AI Max, its most potent laptop chips yet
AMD promised eventual “mobile gaming dominance” back in 2022, and it feels like we’re getting closer every day. Today, the company is announcing not one, not two, but three different families of chips designed to take it there, including final confirmation of the long-rumored “Strix Halo” and “Fire Range” laptop chips.
The former is now known as the Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen AI Max Plus, boasting the most powerful graphics AMD’s ever put in a chip, with up to 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, and a new memory interface with 256GB per second of bandwidth. AMD claims the highest-end AI Max Plus 395 has over 1.4x the graphics performance and 2.6x the 3D rendering performance of Intel’s highest-end Lunar Lake chip, the Intel Core 9 288V — and enough power to frequently beat Apple’s M4 Pro MacBook Pro.
As you can see in the chart above, not all AI Max parts are equal — but they all consume up to a monstrous 120W of power, making them most suitable for machines that’ll be plugged in and / or docked. HP will offer a Z2 Mini G1a desktop and a ZBook Ultra G1a laptop, while Asus will offer the ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet with the new parts.
Fire Range, meanwhile, is AMD’s codename for its new HX- and X3D-series laptop parts, which don’t come with their own groundbreaking integrated GPUs but are designed to be paired with discrete ones. They do, however, contain the new version of its flagship gaming laptop chip with the 3D V-Cache that’s been so popular for boosting frame rate in AMD’s desktop chips. Previously only available in the 7945HX3D, the new 9955HX3D has the same incredible 144MB of cache, though there are a couple of lower-end parts, too:
AMD is also announcing two new X3D desktop chips today, declaring that it now has a CPU that’s “the world’s best processor for gamers and creators.” You can read more about the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D here.
Last and possibly least are AMD’s Z2 Extreme chips for handheld gaming PC competitors to the Steam Deck, which, strangely, raise the low-end TDP up to 15W from just 9W with previous-gen parts and each contain a different generation of GPU: RDNA 3.5 on the Z2 Extreme, RDNA 3 on the Z2, and RDNA 2 on the Z2 Go.
AMD hasn’t yet offered any concrete idea of performance from its Fire Range or Z2 chips, or of battery life from any of these chips in its prerecorded briefing for journalists, though it did promise the Z2 will offer “more performance and capabilities than prior generations” and with “hours and hours of battery life.”