AMD’s CES 2025 announcements include what will probably be yet another ‘world’s fastest’ CPU

Last year’s annual CPU tug-of-war was cleanly won by AMD, its obscenely fast Ryzen 7 9800X3D almost singlehandedly leaving Intel and their Core Ultra chips in a heap of mud and P.E.-spec rope. Coming soon to press that advantage are the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D, a pair of even higher-spec processors that headlined AMD’s plethora of CES 2025 hardware announcements.

No pricing (or exact release date) on these yet, but they both up the core and thread counts over the 9800X3D while peaking at higher boost clock speeds. And, of course, they share the same 3D V-Cache design that makes the 9800X3D such a superlative CPU in the first place. If you don’t know what this is and how it helps game performance, imagine how much faster you could eat Wotsits if you had a massive bucket of them on your desk at all times, instead of having to get up and walk to the kitchen to grab individual packs. In this case the Wotsits are data, the bucket is 3D V-Cache, and the hastened ruination of your digestive system is games running faster.

I wouldn’t bet against the Ryzen 9 9950X3D nabbing the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s crown as the king of gaming CPUs, though whether it (and the Ryzen 9 9900X3D) are actually worth buying will surely come down to price. The 9800X3D is already a super-duper-premium part, and won’t stop bossing games just because something with 24MB more cache comes along, so it could feasibly remain the one to upgrade to if you don’t do the kind of multitasking or media work that would benefit from the added threads.

AMD’s new handheld processors, also unveiled at CES, are a more diverse bunch. In addition to the Ryzen Z2 and Ryzen Z2 Extreme – direct replacements for the Z1 chips powering handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally, ROG Ally X, and Lenovo Legion Go – there’s also a Ryzen Z2 Go designed for cheaper portables. It’s this modest, 4 core/8 thread part that forms the brain of the $599 Lenovo Legion Go S that also got a CES reveal yesterday.

Curiously, these are a mishmash of various generations of AMD Zen CPU and RDNA graphics tech: the Ryzen Z2 Extreme combines Zen 3 and Zen 5c cores, as well as RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics, while the standard Z2 is built around RDNA 3. The Z2 Go relies on the even older RDNA 2, much like the Steam Deck’s custom AMD APU, so it’ll be interesting to see how the three compare when actually running games. Just don’t expect that to happen on a new Deck version, as Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais took to Bluesky to shut down rumours of a Z2-powered Steam Deck successor.

Also curious was the lack of detail AMD gave their other ‘big’ announcement, the first RDNA 4 GPUs: the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. No specs, price, release window, nada. They exist. That’s your lot. It took a since-deleted Asus post (well caught, PCG) to even let slip that they’d come with 16GB of VRAM.

And yet, this dearth of info didn’t stop AMD from letting our Ziff cousins at IGN from testing out the RX 9070 on the show floor. In an Extreme-quality Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 benchmark at native 4K, it averaged 99fps, which IGN reckon puts it roughly on par with a GeForce RTX 4080 Super. Not bad going, except the latter is being replaced by the RTX 5080 at the end of this month, seemingly without significant price bump. As with pretty much of all of AMD’s CES reveals – interesting on paper yet light on performance specifics – we’ll have to wait and see how they do.