In all the hustle and bustle of the showroom floor, it's easy to lose yourself in the mix of new and exciting products that dominate CES 2025. But don't forget the chips and silicon that kicked off this year's event — we didn't.
And how could we? These new generations of chips powered several new laptops we tested during CES, and we had plenty to write home about. However, one chip from AMD stayed at the forefront of our minds throughout the event: the AMD Ryzen AI Max, which claimed our best-in-show Laptop Laurel.
Best in Show CES 2025: AMD Ryzen AI Max
Look. We’re Laptop Mag. Usually, this spot goes to a laptop. Sometimes, it goes to a GPU or GPU series. But AMD decided to try something new this year, and it paid off fantastically.
The new Ryzen AI Max chipsets were codenamed “Strix Halo” and offer powerful gaming, content creation, and AI performance across the full APU.
With up to 128GB of memory on package that can be allocated between the CPU, GPU, or NPU as needed, the Ryzen AI Max chipset is an absolute beast of a processor.
We watched the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 crush an intensive DaVinci Resolve task in seconds on the HP ZBook Ultra 14 g1a, and we even took the non-workstation Ryzen AI Max+ 395 for a few slick encounters in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart on the Asus ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet.
The performance capabilities we’ve seen from the Ryzen AI Max and its sheer boundless potential have us so incredibly excited we couldn’t even think of a laptop that would top “Strix Halo.”
You'll be able to find AMD's Ryzen AI Max APUs in systems starting Q1 2025.
