All the top CPU and GPU news from CES 2025
Here’s what’s coming, all in the first and second quarters of 2025. Full details can be found here Here And Here.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
This is AMD’s fastest and most advanced 16 or 12 core CPU to date, designed specifically for developers and (especially) gamers. According to AMD, the new chip will offer an average performance increase of 8 percent in gaming frame rates and a 10 percent improvement in other tasks.
AMD Ryzen AI 5, AI 7 and AI Max
The Ryzen AI chip is not an NPU, but a CPU tuned for overall performance, including AI workloads. The first Ryzen AI CPU – the Ryzen AI 300 – hit the market in late 2024, and a number of much faster successor models are coming soon, the crowning glory being the Ryzen AI Max (available in seven different SKUs). With up to 16 cores and support for 128GB of memory, the AI Max offers 50 TOPS NPU performance, according to AMD. AMD, of course, says the Max is embarrassingly fast at all sorts of tasks – and boldly claims it can keep up with the Apple M4 CPU at some of them. Ryzen AI chips are also expected to appear in mini PC designs.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 series
AMD didn’t reveal many details about what would set its latest GPU apart, other than that the 9070 series is aimed at mid-range users. More notably, AMD’s naming scheme is evolving to more closely align with Nvidia’s naming of its products. The 9070 and 9070 XT models will be launched this quarter.
Nvidia
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage in a sparkly jacket and spent nearly two hours outlining the company’s upcoming plans – and, as expected, it’s practically all about AI. But the keynote didn’t really talk much about Nvidia’s standard GPUs that contain this new stuff. Full details can be found here Here And Here.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series
Surprising no one, Nvidia announced a new graphics processor, the GeForce RTX 50 series. On the desktop, these GPUs will launch in late January 2025. The big advance is a technology called Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 4 and Multi Frame Generation, which uses AI techniques to generate a portion of the pixel stream instead through brute force tactics, dramatically improving performance. According to Huang, the new graphics card has AI performance of up to 4,000 TOPS. The top card in the series – the 5090 – costs just $1,999.
Starting in March 2025, the RTX 50 series will also be downsized for laptop implementations. You get a little less than half the performance of the mobile version compared to the desktop version, but Huang says the AI ensures your laptop doesn’t melt while you’re using it. RTX 50-equipped laptops are priced up to $2,899 and offer a maximum performance of 1,850 AI TOPS.
Nvidia GB10
This is the backbone for Nvidia project digits“a personal AI supercomputer” that will bring Nvidia’s Blackwell AI platform to the masses. Want to run inference offline on your desktop? Digits and the “AI superchip” GB10 make this possible – with 1 petaflop (1,000 TOPS) performance. The system will cost at least $3,000 and will be available in May 2025.
