Below, we help you make the most of Windows 11 with helpful tutorials, breaking news and in-depth analysis.

So whether you're upgrading your current rig, looking for a powerful pre-built system, or simply checking out the market, Tom's Hardware has you covered.

With industry-leading testing and expert authority built on years of testing, reviewing, and gaming, Tom's Hardware is your trusted game gear guide.

AMD pairs this ‘XDNA’ AI accelerator with the powerful Zen 4 CPU microarchitecture and the RDNA 3 graphics engine to forge the flagship models, while two lower-tier models round out the stack, combining to create compelling lower-cost solutions for entry-level gaming and small form factor builds with Zen 4c cores. The new chips came to market on January 31.

Will AMD succeed? Will the AI PC take off? Tom's Hardware is your guide to this pivotal new innovation.

Qualcomm’s chip, using TSMC's 4-nanometer process on a single die, will have 12 "high-performance" Oryon cores on each chip going up to 3.8 GHz. However, of those 12 chips, the company says single- or dual-core boost up to 4.3 GHz is possible. The cores are batched into three clusters of four on the die. The chip will have up to 64GB of LPDDR5x RAM, with up to 136 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and 42MB of total cache.

Qualcomm is pushing the chip as having "best-in-class" multi-threaded CPU performance. The company showed journalists charts of performance compared to a competitor's 10-core and 12-core laptop chips, showing up to twice the performance in Geekbench 6.1 at one-third of the power. (Qualcomm didn't name the chips in its presentation, but later told me the 10-core chip is a Intel Core i7-1355U and the 12-core chip is a Core i7-1360P). Compared to a 14-core chip on the same test (later clarified as the Intel Core i7-13800H), Qualcomm showed significant improvements in performance per watt, and it suggested the Snapdragon X Elite gets up to a 60% performance improvement.

AMD was first to market with the Ryzen 7040, the first CPU to feature an NPU. Hawk Point, officially the 8040, is the company's current offering. Intel's flagship is called Meteor Lake, announced in Dec. 2023 -- but look for the next-gen Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake in 2024. And soon Qualcomm will power AI PCs thanks to its ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips, which will launch in laptops in mid-2024 -- at Computex, perhaps?

The Heart of the AI PC

Chips from AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm will power this next generation of AI PCs. Here's a deep dive into these cutting edge CPUs. 

In 2022, the U.S. passed legislation to support its semiconductor industry called the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. Officially H.R. 4346, the $280 billion spending package was signed into law by President Joe Biden to encourage the growth of the U.S. semiconductor industry -- and help win a burgeoning chip war with China. And in the waning days of the Biden administration, contracts are finally being inked.

Key beneficiaries

Intel: The U.S. will invest $7.86 billion in Intel, including $3.5 billion to boost the production of advanced chips for military and intelligence purposes.

TSMC: The U.S. has settled on $6.6 billion to support TSMC's efforts to build an enormous fab in Arizona.

Polar Semiconductor: A Minnesotan manufacturer of sensor and power semiconductors was the first company to be awarded under the CHIPS program.

GlobalFoundries: Headquartered in Malta, New York, the U.S. contract manufacturing giant will receive $1.5 billion in direct funding.

BAE Systems: $35 million will go to BAE to produce chips for fighter planes.

Semiconductors power everything from PCs and data centers to cars, lightbulbs, and refrigerators. Control over their manufacture means control over billions of dollars and the world economy -- and the US, China, Taiwan, and others are waging a geopolitical battle for exactly that. Welcome to the chip war.

Major moments

Dec. 2, 2024: The DOC ratcheted up sanctions to curtail China's AI and military tech, this time entirely blocking shipments of HBM memory to China.

May 8, 2024: The U.S. government has withdrawn select export licenses from Intel and Qualcomm, effectively preventing them from supplying processors to Huawei.

Mar. 9, 2024:  China is assembling the third phase of its Big Fund investment in semiconductor projects, a $27 billion investment to counter U.S. sanctions.

Jan. 27, 2024:  The DOC introduced a proposal to prevent foreign entities, particularly from China, from using U.S. cloud computing for AI model training, a new level to the conflict.

Nov. 02, 2023:  The Nvidia RTX 4090 -- The fastest gaming GPU -- will no longer be available for export to China starting Nov. 17.

Oct. 24, 2023:  The DOC sped up the implementation of its latest export curbs, immediately blocking Nvidia from shipping A100, A800, H100, H800, and L40S GPUs to China.

Oct. 7, 2023: Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner demand a limit to China's access to American RISC-V innovations.

Aug. 10, 2023:  President Joe Biden signed an executive order restricting U.S. investments in Chinese tech sectors, including AI, semiconductors, and quantum computing.

Aug. 01, 2022:  The U.S. extended its ban on chipmaking equipment produced by domestic firms that are sold to Chinese companies.

Dec. 18, 2020: The DOC blacklisted SMIC along with 60 other Chinese companies citing ties with the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Intel leans on TSMC’s process node tech for three of the four active tiles on the processor, selecting two less expensive TSMC nodes for some functions, and one higher-density and higher-performance TSMC node than its own ‘Intel 4’ node that it uses for its CPU tile.

With Meteor Lake, Intel has baked AI directly into the chip through a neural processing unit (NPU), a dedicated AI engine that’s designed specifically to run sustained AI inference workloads. Paired with a forthcoming version of Windows supporting deep AI integration, expected summer of 2024, Meteor Lake could herald the beginning of the AI PC age, computers that can tap into AI to simplify our computing experience and make laptops and desktops exponentially more powerful. 

These are needed changes as Intel looks to regain the lead over its primary fab competitor, TSMC, in process node tech, and outmaneuver its primary chip competitor, AMD, with its new chiplet-based architecture. Intel also has to fend off Apple, which has now made a disruptive entrance into the laptop market with faster, more power efficient processors. Will Intel succeed? Will the AI PC take off? Tom's Hardware is your guide to this pivotal new innovation.

You'll find Meteor Lake in:

Samsung Galaxy Book 4 | Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, IdeaPad Pro 5i | Alienware m16 R2 | Asus ZenBook 14, ROG Zephyrus G14 | HP Spectre x360 14 | MSI Prestige 16 AI | Acer Swift Go 14 | Dell XPS 14 & 16

Trending topics

Rare earth metals | Panther Lake | Battlefield 6 | AI | Nvidia | RTX 5090 | Intel 18A | undersea cables | Intel | AMD Instinct MI450 | Wi-Fi 8

Browse CPU-related content on Tom's Hardware: 

Best Picks | Reference | Round Ups | How to | Opinion | Features

The tech world's biggest computing players — Nvidia, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, among others — are all participating in this year's show, along with PC OEMs like Asus, MSI, and Acer, and component vendors like Cooler Master and Lian Li. We'll be covering all the announcements here, and we'll have editors on the ground going hands-on with the new products.

Tom's Hardware is on the ground, meeting with the movers and shakers, and were hands-on with some of the latest upcoming products days before the show officially started.

This year promises to be an exciting show once again. We expect lots of interesting new hardware from across (and beyond) the PC spectrum.

◾ CES 2025 Day 2: Corsair Xeneon Edge auxiliary touchscreen, Project Zero motherboards, Gigabyte’s 2025 portfolio, and more

◾ CES 2025 Day 1: New laptops from Lenovo, Snapdragon X for desktops, Wi-Fi 7 routers, and more

◾ CES 2025 Day 0: Nvidia RTX 50 Series GPUs, Arrow Lake goes mobile, Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Dell retires XPS branding