The New Ryzen AI Max, Fire Range, and Z3D Laptop Chips: Parts, Capabilities, Power and Battery Life
AMD promised eventual “mobile gaming dominance” back in 2022, and it feels like we’re getting closer every day. The company is announcing several different families of chips today, including 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. If you want to beat Apple’s M4 Pro MacBook Pro, you need to purchase the highest-end artificial intelligence Max Plus 395.
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 also contain the latest version of its flagship gaming laptop chip with 3D V-Cache that is very popular for boosting frame rate in 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 about some of the new features of the new Ryzen 9X3D here.
The company has yet to give a concrete idea of performance from its Fire Range or Z2 chips or battery life, but it promised the Z2 will offer more performance and capabilities than prior generations.
AMD has just officially announced its full lineup of Ryzen Z2 chips for handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck, after a brief tease this fall — but as of today, it’s pretty muddy who they’re for or what they’re going to do for handheld PC gaming.
But stepping away from the Extreme, the vanilla Z2 has the same number of cores as today’s existing Z1 Extreme with the same RDNA 3 and possibly the same CPU cores, and AMD hasn’t mentioned any improvements over that chip yet. The Z2 Go has less in the way of cores than the Z1, but it has 12 more graphics chips than the Z1, and four more than the Deck.
And, each of these new chips has a higher minimum TDP than the previous generation (a quoted 15 watts, up from a quoted 9 watts), which could potentially mean less battery life when you crank down the CPU’s power mode for less intensive games. The Z1 Extreme has a sweet spot of 15W and can dip into as low as 4W, whereas theSteam Deck has a sweet spot of 15W and can dip into as low as 4W.