Last year’s annual CPU competition was handily won by AMD, with its obscenely rapid Ryzen 7 9800X3D almost single-handedly leaving Intel and its Core Ultra chips in a pile of PE-spec mud and rope. This advantage will soon be demonstrated by Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D, a pair of processors with even higher specifications that were the main characters of numerous AMD announcements at CES 2025.
There’s no pricing (or exact release date) yet, but they boost both core and thread count over the 9800X3D while achieving higher boost clock speeds. And of course, they have the same 3D V-Cache design that makes the 9800X3D such a great processor in the first place. If you don’t know what it is and how it affects your game performance, imagine how much faster you could eat Wotsits if you had a bucket of them on your desk at all times, instead of having to get up and go to the kitchen to pick up individual packets. In this case, Wotsits is data, the bucket is 3D V-Cache, and accelerated digestive destruction is faster gaming.
| Cores/Threads | Maximum gain | TDP | L3 cache | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 9950X3D | 16/32 | 5.7GHz | 170 W | 144MB |
| Ryzen 9 9900X3D | 24/12 | 5.5GHz | 120 W | 140 MB |
I wouldn’t bet that the Ryzen 9 9950X3D will take the Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s crown as the king of gaming CPUs, although whether it (and the Ryzen 9 9900X3D) will actually be worth buying will certainly depend on price. The 9800X3D is already part of the super-duper-premium range and won’t stop dominating gaming just because something with a 24MB larger cache comes out, so it’ll probably remain the one to upgrade to if you don’t do the kind of multitasking or media work that would benefit on added threads.
AMD’s up-to-date notebook 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 that power palmtops such as the Asus ROG Ally, ROG Ally X and Lenovo Legion Go – there is also the Ryzen Z2 Go designed for cheaper portable devices. It is this humble part with 4 cores and 8 threads that constitutes the brain of the $599 Lenovo Legion Go S, which was also presented yesterday at CES.
| Cores/Threads | Maximum gain | Graphics cores | Hide | Configurable TDP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen Z2 Extreme | 8/16 | 5.0GHz | 16 | 24 MB | 15-35 W |
| Ryzen Z2 | 8/16 | 5.1GHz | 12 | 24 MB | 15-30 W |
| Ryzen Z2 Go | 4/8 | 4.3GHz | 12 | 10MB | 15-30 W |
Interestingly, they are a mishmash of different generations of AMD Zen processors and RDNA graphics technology: the Ryzen Z2 Extreme combines Zen 3 and Zen 5c cores, as well as integrated RDNA 3.5 graphics, while the standard Z2 is built around RDNA 3. The Z2 Go is based on on the even older RDNA 2, as does Steam Deck’s custom AMD APU, so it will be compelling to see how the three solutions compare when actually running games. Just don’t expect this to happen in the up-to-date Deck version, as stated by Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais Blue to put an end to rumors about a Z2-powered Steam Deck successor.
Another compelling thing was the lack of details that AMD announced in its other “big” announcement, i.e. the first RDNA 4 graphics processors: Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. No specs, no price, no release window, nothing. They exist. This is your fate. This required deleting the Asus post (well caught, PCG) to even overlook that they will come with 16GB of VRAM.
And yet this lack of information did not stop AMD from allowing our Ziff cousins to work together IGN from testing the RX 9070 on the dance floor. In the extremely high-fidelity Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 benchmark at native 4K resolution, it averaged 99 frames per second, which puts it roughly on par with the GeForce RTX 4080 Super, according to IGN. Not bad, except that the latter will be replaced by the RTX 5080 at the end of this month, seemingly without any significant price boost. As with almost all of AMD’s announcements at CES – compelling on paper, but minor in terms of performance – we’ll have to wait and see how they fare.
