The Essential CPU and GPU Field Guide for 2025

Here’s what’s coming, all in Q1 and Q2 of 2025. Complete details can be found here and here.

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D

This is AMD’s fastest and most advanced CPU to date, featuring 16 or 12 cores and purpose-built for creators and (especially) gamers. AMD says the new chip will provide an average 8 percent performance boost on gaming framerates and a 10 percent improvement on other tasks.

AMD Ryzen AI 5, AI 7, and AI Max

The Ryzen AI chip isn’t an NPU but rather a CPU that’s tuned for overall performance, including AI workloads. The first Ryzen AI CPU—the Ryzen AI 300—launched in late 2024, and a collection of much faster follow-ups are arriving soon, topping out at the Ryzen AI Max (available in seven different SKUs). With up to 16 cores and support for 128 GB of memory, AMD says the AI Max offers NPU performance of 50 TOPS. AMD naturally says the Max is embarrassingly fast at all kinds of tasks—and boldly says it can compete with the Apple M4 CPU on some of them. Ryzen AI chips are also set to show up in mini PC designs.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series

AMD hasn’t revealed much detail about what would distinguish its latest GPU, except that the 9070 line is targeted at midrange users. More notable is that AMD’s naming scheme is evolving to align more closely with how Nvidia names its products. The 9070 and 9070 XT are coming this quarter.

Nvidia

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage in a sparkly jacket and spent close to two hours outlining the company’s upcoming plans—and as expected it’s virtually all about AI. But rather little of the keynote covered Nvidia’s bread-and-butter GPUs, which include this new stuff. Complete details can be found 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 at the end of 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 part of the pixel stream instead of doing so via brute force tactics, dramatically improving performance. Huang says the new graphics card has up to 4,000 TOPS of AI power. The top-tier card in the series—the 5090—will run a mere $1,999.

The RTX 50 series is also being shrunk down for laptop implementations, starting in March 2025. You’ll get a bit less than half the performance from the mobile version vs. the desktop, but Huang says AI will ensure your laptop won’t melt while you’re using it. Prices for RTX 50-equipped laptops will run up to $2,899, providing a maximum power 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 on your desktop, offline? Digits and the GB10 “AI superchip” are going to make that possible—with 1 petaflop (1,000 TOPS) of performance. The system will cost a minimum of $3,000, with availability in May 2025.