You never know what you're going to get with CES. Of course, we knew we'd hear a lot about AI -- check -- and that there'd be announcements of new CPUs and GPUs -- also check. But you just never know how the all the pomp and hoo-ha of this annual mega tech event is going to pay off in the real-world, for regular consumers. Does the average PC user have something to be excited about now that the veil has come off of this year's product launches? If the PCWorld staff is any indication, the answer is yes!

AMD has launched what one executive called "the most advanced mobile X86 processor ever created" at CES 2025: The Ryzen AI Max and AI Max, with absolutely massive capabilities to run graphics and AI workloads. AMD is positioning this "Strix Halo" chip as a sort of hybrid for graphics and AI workstations, comparing it to Nvidia's existing GeForce 4090 GPU in terms of running AI LLMs at up to 70 billion parameters. But the Ryzen AI Max offers more than just that. It's an APU with graphics capabilities that push into discrete GPU territory -- in the 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark, for example, the chip offers 258 percent the graphics performance of Intel's Core Ultra 9 288V (Arrow Lake) CPU. It also offers excellent AI performance, both with or without the NPU.