AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000HX mobile processors go head to head with Intel's Core Ultra 200HXs

AMD has announced its “Fire Range” Ryzen 9000 HX series of laptop processors at CES 2025, a new line-up aimed squarely at gamers and content creators looking for desktop-like performance on the go.

These processors are the latest steps in AMD's strategy to bridge the performance gap between traditional laptop processors and their desktop counterparts. What’s also interesting is how AMD has positioned and timed the Ryzen 9000 HX to directly compete with Intel’s Core Ultra 200HX series, which was also announced at CES and has similarly positioned itself as a processor for desktop-like performance in laptops. While AMD has yet to provide concrete benchmarks or reveal design wins for its new processors, the company is confident that the Ryzen 9000 HX series will challenge Intel’s dominance in the high-performance mobile processor market.

The standout of the new range is the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D, a mobile high-end processor that combines the Zen 5 architecture with AMD’s impressive 3D V-Cache technology. This chip is forged from the same silicon as the just announced Ryzen 9 9950X3D desktop processor (read about it here), and the addition of 96MB of extra L3 cache stacked beneath one of its two chiplets promises a substantial boost in gaming performance. AMD is positioning the Ryzen 9 9955HX3D as the “ultimate mobile processor” in gaming and content creation workloads and on paper at least that seems very likely, though we’ll leave our final judgement until we get our hands on a laptop powered by one.

Also making its debut are two Fire Range non-X3D models, the Ryzen 9 9950HX and Ryzen 9 9850HX. These processors follow the same architectural design as the 9955X3D but excludes 3D V-Cache. While lacking the cache advantage of the flagship processor, these processors still pack quite a punch, with the 9850HX packing 12 cores and 24 threads, and the 9950HX carrying 16 cores and 32 threads. These processors signal AMD’s shift to a more focused, high-performance HX line-up compared to the previous 7000 series, which had as many as six different processors.

As mentioned earlier, all three processors are based on the same chiplet-based architecture used in AMD’s desktop chips. So, like its desktop cousins, the Fire Range Ryzen laptop processors also saw the same generational improvements in TDP – all three Ryzen 9 9000 HX series processors comes with a 54W TDP rating, a notable decrease from the 75W+ TDP of the previous generation.

On the graphics front, AMD has opted to include its RDNA 2 integrated GPU, which offers basic capabilities but is unlikely to handle high-end gaming workloads. That’s understandable, since all high-performance laptops, whether it’s Intel or AMD powered, rely on discrete GPUs from NVIDIA or AMD for gaming or other high intensity content creation tasks anyway.

AMD has not disclosed specific laptop models that will feature these chips, but the company has hinted at a broader rollout than previous generations when it launchs in H1 2025. Last year’s Ryzen 9 7945HX3D was limited to a handful of premium laptops, such as the ROG Strix Scar, so it remains to be seen if AMD can convince other laptop brands to adopt these mobile processors over what Intel’s mobile platforms. AMD has seriously bruised Intel in the consumer desktop space with its Ryzen 9000 series, and it’ll be interesting to see if it can do the same in the laptop space.

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