AMD’s CES Coup: Ryzen AI Chips Promise All-Day Battery and Console-Class Gaming

AMD’s CES Coup: Ryzen AI Chips Promise All-Day Battery and Console-Class Gaming

Las Vegas — The ballroom lights dimmed, a low synth hum rose, and AMD CEO Lisa Su stepped into the spotlight holding a silver wafer no bigger than a postage stamp. “This,” she told the hushed crowd at the Venetian, “is what the next billion PCs will look like.”

What Su held was AMD’s newest Ryzen “Hawk Point” AI processor, a 4-nanometer slab of silicon that fuses an eight-core Zen 4 CPU with a dedicated XDNA neural engine. The company claims the chip delivers up to 60% faster generative-AI workloads than Apple’s M3 while sipping 30% less power than its own predecessor—numbers that, if true, could redraw the battle lines of the laptop wars.

From Spreadsheets to Stable Diffusion

Until now, AI acceleration in consumer PCs has felt like a footnote—nice for background blur, overkill for everything else. AMD’s pitch is bigger: run a 7-billion-parameter large-language model entirely on your laptop, no cloud required. During a demo, a mid-range HP Spectre-style reference machine churned out 20 Stable Diffusion images in under two minutes while staying cool enough to rest on a denim-clad lap.

“We’re not chasing benchmarks,” AMD client chief Jack Huynh told reporters. “We’re chasing the moment you close the lid at 5 p.m. with 65% battery left.”

Gamers Get a Slice of the Pie, Too

Su book-ended her keynote with a second reveal: the Ryzen 8040 “Hawk Point Extreme,” a 45-watt variant aimed at 14-inch gaming rigs. Paired with Radeon 780M graphics, the chip pushed 108 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p medium, matching the mobile RTX 3050 while drawing 40% less wall power, according to AMD-supplied benchmarks.

“The holy grail is playable framerates on an ultra-portable without the airplane-seat power brick,” said Anshel Sag, analyst at Moor Insights. “AMD just got a lot closer.”

The Fine Print

Both chips arrive in February inside machines from ASUS, Lenovo, MSI and a refreshed Surface Laptop Studio. Prices start at $899 for the 15-watt U-series and $1,299 for the 45-watt HX gaming variants. Microsoft, for its part, confirmed that the AI engine will power Windows Studio Effects and an upcoming “Copilot+” feature set launching this spring.

• Up to 16 TOPS (trillion operations per second) from the XDNA engine—double Intel’s Meteor Lake NPU.
• Support for INT8, FP16 and bfloat16 to future-proof next-gen models.
• Full compatibility with Hugging Face’s 150,000-model repository via an open-source ONNX runtime.

Market Tremors

Intel’s share price dipped 2.4% in after-hours trading, while AMD gained 4%. “Investors smell a potential bloodbath in the $35 billion laptop market,” said Stacy Rasgon, semiconductor analyst at Bernstein. “If AMD can hit the battery claims, Intel’s Raptor Lake refresh suddenly looks dated.”

Still, the road to dominance is littered with slide-deck promises. Battery figures come from AMD’s own labs using MobileMark 25, a test known for generous idle periods. Independent reviews will matter more than keynote swagger.

The Story Behind the Story

Offstage, Su recalled a 2019 round-table where Microsoft urged chipmakers to embed AI at the transistor level. “We bet the company on it,” she said, revealing that the XDNA block took four years and a “mid-three-billion” R&D budget. “The question was never could we build it, but could we build it without killing battery life.”

Walking the halls of CES, you can already feel the answer humming inside sleek silver prototypes—laptops that stay cool, quiet and, for the first time, genuinely smart.