This new AMD CPU might be the most exciting development in gaming laptops in years

AMD has just lifted the lid on a couple of new laptop CPUs that, on the surface, might appear to be a fairly boring addition to its existing range of chips, given that they're based on an existing design. However, the devil's in the details, and one of these new AMD laptop CPUs in particular could usher in a new era of gaming laptops, if it delivers on its performance promise and it hits the right price.

The new chips that are being announced today are based on AMD's existing Strix Point architecture, which we've already seen powering one of the best gaming laptops around, the ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet. However, the initial run of Strix Point chips saw them boasting either a stupendously powerful integrated GPU, but with unnecessarily high CPU core counts that made them expensive, or the versions with lower CPU core counts had less powerful GPUs. These new chips redress that balance.

The best way to explain this is simply to put the full range in a table, as you can see below. The three existing models are the AI Max+ 395, AI Max 390, and AI Max 385, and you can see that only the AI Max 395+ comes with the most powerful 60TFLOPs GPU, with the other two models having a less powerful 48TFLOPs GPU.

The two new chips being announced today, though, both include the most powerful GPU configuration, but with either only 12 CPU cores, for the AI Max+ 392, or eight CPU cores for the AI Max+ 388. That means you can now get the most powerful integrated graphics chip in the world without being saddled with the high cost and power consumption of a 16-core CPU.

But why does this matter so much when you can buy gaming laptops that just use a separate laptop GPU, such as on the Razer Blade 14 2025, for instance? Well, if you've ever used such a laptop, you'll know that it constantly has to switch between using the integrated graphics of the CPU (for light tasks like using the desktop) and the other GPU for gaming and GPU-accelerated apps such as Photoshop or local AI models. This switching is mostly automatic, but it doesn't always play ball and can lead to regular moments of unresponsiveness from the system and relatively frequent app crashes, too, in my experience.

With an ultra-powerful integrated GPU, you can avoid all this. Just one chip is used all the time. Experiencing this with the ROG Flow Z13 was night and day compared to other gaming laptops, and what's more, the power efficiency of the AI Max 390 in that device meant it still had incredible battery life too.

As for just how powerful this GPU is, in our benchmarks of the ROG Flow Z13, it delivered 45fps average in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with graphical settings on ultra (50fps at high settings). However, it only used the AI Max 390 with the 32 CU GPU, so devices based on the new AI Max 388 or AI Max 392 should be even faster.

Compared to a powerful dedicated GPU like the laptop RTX 5070 in the Razer Blade 14, the latter will still outclass AMD's new chips - that laptop achieved 97fps average in the same test. However, solidly playable performance at 1080p with high settings is seriously impressive for integrated graphics.

Still, it remains to be seen just how good the performance of this CPU will be and just how expensive devices that use it will be - existing devices that use Strix Point/Ryzen AI Max chips have tended to be very expensive - but I know Asus is set to launch a new, relatively entry-level gaming laptop using these new chips, and expect plenty of others to follow suit.