What if you could have sixteen desktop-class AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and a 96GB professional GPU in a thin & light laptop without compromising performance? Well, that’s the promise of AMD’s Ryzen AI MAX processors, code-named Strix Halo, and that’s the heart that beats under the skin of HP’s new ZBook Ultra 14 G1a laptop, as well as the company’s new pint-sized Z2 Mini PC.
There are no caveats here: you get up to sixteen Zen 5 CPU cores, and these are the full-fat desktop versions, with all the compute and all the cache of a Ryzen 9 9950X. You also get an RDNA 3.5-architecture GPU with 20 WGPs. That’s 40 compute units and more horsepower than a Radeon RX 7600 XT. These two compute clusters, CPU and GPU, share a unified memory interface with up to 128 GB of LPDDR5x-8000MHz memory.
What do such specifications allow you to do? Well, perhaps you could work on massive projects in Adobe or Solidworks without closing your five-hundred browser tabs. Or you could run massive LLMs like Wizard 8x22B or Mistral Large directly on your laptop with excellent responsiveness, thanks to copious amounts of low-latency LPDDR5x memory. Or perhaps your the type to run incredibly detailed physical simulations, but now you wouldn’t have to remote into the compute server. And at the end of the day, you could play a triple-A game alongside running a powerful LLM, thanks to the platform’s integrated 50-TOPS NPU. The potential here is vast, really.
HP’s upcoming ZBook Ultra 14 G1a isn’t the smallest or lightest laptop we’ve ever seen in the 14-inch class. However, it’s relatively svelte and rather stylish, coming in at 0.73″ (185mm) thick and weighing 3.3 lbs (1.5 kg). The available screens are your choice of a 1920×1200 IPS-like LCD or a 2880×1800 OLED with a 120-Hz refresh rate and 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space.
The machine that your author is really excited about, however, is the HP Z2 Mini G1a Workstation Desktop PC. Word salad naming aside, this is a mini-PC with an integrated power supply that is also based around one of the aforementioned Strix Halo processors. It will assuredly have both more robust power delivery (thanks to a 300W integrated power supply) and improved cooling to support the max 120-watt TDP of the Ryzen AI MAX SoCs.
In terms of specifications, Strix Halo tells you most of what you need to know, but you can equip the system with up to 8TB of PCIe storage in its dual M.2 sockets from the factory. It comes with 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 7, but if you’re not satisfied with that, there are two “Flex I/O” modules that can be used to install additional USB ports, extra LAN (including 10-Gigabit), serial ports, a physical power button, or a remote management kit.
If you’re eager to see these two machines in the flesh (rather than in product photos), you can check out our video above, where we got to talk to HP about and see both of these systems in-person at pre-CES 2025 workshop. HP wouldn’t give us pricing or hard availability on these systems just yet, but said they will be available sometime in the Spring this year.