AMD isn't pulling any punches in gaming laptops. The company's latest plan announced over at CES 2025 is to take its beefiest 16-core/32-thread processor, whack loads more cache on the top, and run it at a laptop-friendly TDP of 54 W.
It's called the AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D. It comes with a max boost clock of 5.4 GHz and 144 MB of L3 cache. It's a little bit slower than the desktop version, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D also just announced at CES, but really only a little bit.
That desktop chip runs at 5.7 GHz and 170 W. It really is just the desktop chip reborn for mobile, too. The same chiplet design with a laptop-friendly socket.
A large package by laptop standards. This chip follows on from the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, which we were impressed with in testing but never saw much of again.
It is available in a couple of ROG Strix Scar 17 laptops, as we tested, but little else. Here's hoping that changes with this newer version and it's more widely available.