Apple’s M Pro and M Max chips used in modern MacBook Pro, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro computers have proved difficult to beat, especially in the laptop space. Now, AMD wants to change that with the new Ryzen AI Max chips.

AMD has announced its new Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen AI Max PRO Series processors. They are powerful chips that are meant to deliver, according to AMD’s own words, a “workstation-like” experience in a thin and light laptop. This could help kick off a new wave of MacBook Pro competitors, which have featured bigger, more powerful CPUs ever since Apple made the switch to ARM-based Apple Silicon. There are some fundamental differences, such as the fact that AMD’s offering is x86-based while Apple uses the ARM architecture, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

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As for the specs, the Ryzen AI Max series features up to 16 “Zen 5” CPU cores and 40 AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics compute units—we didn’t see RDNA 4 graphics cards show up during the keynote, so the massive integrated GPU here is the closest thing to a graphics card AMD announced today. We also have an integrated AMD XDNA 2 Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which boasts up to 50 TOPS of AI processing power. This dedicated NPU is designed to accelerate AI workloads, enabling faster performance in AI-enabled applications and supporting larger AI models. Systems equipped with the Ryzen AI Max processors will also benefit from up to 128GB of unified memory, with 96GB available for graphics.

Systems powered by the Ryzen AI Max and Ryzen AI Max PRO Series processors are expected to hit the market in the first quarter of 2025, and we’re definitely excited to see what kind of laptops arrive with this hardware. Even if you’re solidly in the Apple camp, more competition could push Mac computers to continue improving.

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Source: AMD