AMD's announcement today is flipping incredible the ryzen 9 950x 3D looks
like the fastest consumer CPU on the planet Bar None they teased their new
rdna 4 desktop gpus and their mobile
lineup looks poised to absolutely dominate with chips boasting 24 hours of
battery life all the way up to this monster that sucks back up to a whopping
120 watts to power its desktop class
onboard Graphics all of which sounds
great so why am I so confused and pissed
off right now because as good as the technology is it really does look good
AMD's attempt at streamlining their product naming and branding is an
absolute dogs breakfast here's a little chart that we made with the speeds and
feeds that they shared for all the new Chips completely lost yeah that's what I
thought but hey maybe I should be thanking AMD for all the free views that
I'm going to get from all the confused people who just want to know what the heck they're actually
buying let's get into it then after this word from our sponsor Wicked cushions
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today starting with the new desktop CPUs we've got the ryzen 99900 x3d and 9950
x3d like last generation they've got 12 and 16 cores but unlike last
generation's x3d chips they are not downclocked and they boast maximum boost
speeds of up to 5.5 and 5.7 GHz respectively on paper this should
resulting anywhere from the same performance to a nice little boost for
productivity and as for gaming well there the uplift is going to be anywhere
from the same performance to a nice OMG WTF Source depending on what you're
playing I mean check out that alleged CS two performance uplift like I'm getting
hot here boys these are all launching soon TM and while we don't have pricing
you can expect them to be very expensive right alongside those we're
expecting new gpus finally we're going to complain about the naming later
though because hey as long as the price is right it's not going to matter and
while details about their upcoming rdna 4 architecture were sparse in our
briefing what we do know is that it's manufactured on a 4 nanm process with
second generation AI acceleration and third generation Ray tracing
accelerators now AMD also claims that rdna 4 will have better media encoding
quality with their second gen AMD Radiance display engine but how much
better it is I don't know I'm hoping for not fundamentally broken but that
remains to be seen what doesn't remain to be seen is the naming scheme which
appears to be a straight ripoff of NVIDIA's sorry which explicitly is a
straight ripoff of NVIDIA I don't like it but I mean hey if your classmate is
worth 3.5 trillion I don't really blame
you for copying their homework and at least it gives us a rough idea of what
to expect for performance from the RX 970 and 970 XT probably close to the
upcoming RTX 5070 now it's time to talk
about some of the most monstrous mobile CPUs that we've ever seen the ryzen 9
9950 HX line and the ryzen AI Max 300
line all of them use AMD's latest Zen 5
architecture but they're targeting two distinct classes of notebook the former
seems to be basically desktop chips that are repackaged for mobile workstations
and gaming battle stations I'm talking up to 16 cores clock speeds up to 5.4
GHz massive 54 Watt tdps and on the top
end a whopping 144 megab of 3D vcash now
they're onboard Graphics that's trashed tier basically it's just to save power
when 3D acceleration isn't needed but on a chip like this I don't really think
that matters because when you're spending this kind of money you're going to have a top speec GPU in your system
anyway to be clear AMD didn't provide pricing but I stand by what I just said
moving on to ryzen AI Max 300 it seems like here AMD doesn't just want to
compete with Intel they want to dominate them again we're looking at Cutting Edge
Zen 5 CPU cores top to bottom in this lineup and power envelopes that range
from reasonable in a performance laptop to obscene 120
Watts I mean we got to imagine that won't really happen in you know mobile
battery powered devices that much but hey at least it gives AMD's Partners a
ton of flexibility in both performance laptops and even in small form factor
desktops the only question is if the cut down desktop chips are 55 Watts where is
120 watts going ah I'm glad you asked it
looks like a big part of it is going to the massive number of rdna 3.5 GPU cores
see AMD's last gen tops out at 16 cus or
GPU cores the new Max chips they start
at 16 and go all the way up to 40
they've also got a new memory interface with up to 256 GB per second of
bandwidth and if AMD slides are to be believed even Apple's M4 Max chip one
that basically everyone has been super impressed with is going to get a run for
its money here now curiously ryzen 3
ryzen 5 ryzen 7 and ryzen 9 designations are all absent from this line they're
all just Max or Max Plus or Max Plus Pro
so figuring out what you're buying here it's going to be a nightmare wait oh
sorry no bad Lin we'll talk about the branding mess later for now while it's
still hard to say how much Ai and npus are going to actually improve your
day-to-day life the entire MAX Line can do 50 tops or trillions of operations
per second and for comparison Intel's 285k launched late last year maxes out
at 36 so maybe Intel can out aai the
non-max ryzen AI 300s not likely on top of having the
same 50 top npu these non Max chips are
all using Zen 5 cores and rdna 3.5
Graphics just with lower core counts cash and power consumption okay it's not
actually quite that simple some of the cores in the non-max chips are actually
Zen 5C which is short for compact which
can result in lower clock speeds but can also result in better efficiency so in
mobile devices which are often thermally constrained anyway it might be an okay
compromise only time will tell moving on to the product I'm most interested in
it's time to talk about ryzen Z2 handheld gaming chips and these ones
are well they're a little disappointing actually the Z2 extreme does get a CPU
upgrade it's Zen 5 now and rdna 3.5
Graphics but it only gets three fullsize cores and five compact ones
we do get four more GPU
cores also the regular Z2 the
non-extreme that's still Zen 4 and rdna
3 so it's basically just a Z1 Extreme as
for the Z2 go I was really excited about this one when I first saw it I was
thinking man four cores that's still plenty for older and lighter games this
thing is going to rock for like super compact gaming handhelds then my hopes
were dashed Zen 3 plus on the the CPU
guys that's a chip that is already feeling a little long in the tooth and
is not very efficient by current standards what an absolute missed
opportunity finally last and least they
showed off the remainder of their ryzen 200 series mobile chips wait ryzen 200 I
thought this is ryzen 300 announcement that's right coming as early as Q2 2025
you can buy old school Zen 4 processors two amds credit I mean I
guess at least they f the issue they had before where the first number and the
product number did not indicate the architecture but this is still super
messy anyway with these 200 series chips
we either get removed or chopped down npus in in any case they're not powerful
enough for co-pilot plus and then we get a mix of either full sizee or compact
Zen 4 cores with rdna 3 gpus these are
last gen through and through so all I can really hope for is that they'll be
affordable I mean to be clear there's nothing wrong with having a last gen
product as long as it comes at a discount and it's clear what the
customer is buying especially on mobile where efficiency is so important and
where it's changed so much over the last couple of years and to AMD's credit they
kind of accomplished this by at least calling all the Zen 4 stuff ryzen 200
but I am still finding AMD's branding extremely messy if ryzen 9 is top of the
line well then why does a ryzen 900
series series exist at all and what the heck is Max speaking of which while
we're at it what is Max Plus Max is
short for maximum by definition you can't have maximum plus like I feel like
I'm on the playground again well I hate you infinity plus one take a math lesson
and I haven't even gotten to Pro yet I do understand the appeal of charging
your business customers a bit extra for your Fleet and Remote Management and
security features but in practice isn't
this the kind of thing that could just be a software unlock I mean they are
almost certainly the same physical chip do you really need to add a pro version
of nearly every CPU in the lineup it's
just confusing finally AMD stop changing
your GPU names the big change going from hundreds to thousands with the 5,000
series that was mostly okay but then recently you reintroduced XTX and then
you added this weird GRE variant and then now you're moving the numbers
around again it's only been three
generations AMD I'm getting Whiplash here I mean I get it you want to
simplify things and make it easier to compare with NVIDIA but guys we being
honest you only want that comparison when it's convenient and as soon as you
fall behind again you're going to want to obfuscate it again and then we're left with a whole new mess do you know
how easy it is for NVIDIA's customers to upgrade hmm I want a new GPU I just buy
that thing but with a higher number at the beginning there's a reason that
Apple just calls it iPhone every year AMD you got to solve this that was a lot
of information so much that I almost forgot to plug LTT
store.com pick up a blank t-shirt today because that was the expression on my
face when this announcement hit man seriously that deck anyway most of the
products do look awesome and like I said before I'm excited to get my hands on
them and review them but man knowing all this stuff it's like my job and even I'm
having a hard time keeping it all straight we literally made a video just
last year about AMD's trash naming scheme and how to decipher it and now
it's completely out of date and we're going to have to do it again super cool super cool like this
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at our Link in the video description today if you guys enjoyed this video uh
maybe check out the one where we complained about this stuff we're all
we're all getting played and I'm tired of it no really that's the name of the
video but yes yes I am and I'm and you
are too