AMD reheats last year’s Ryzen AI and X3D CPUs for 2026’s laptops and desktops

As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off, major chip manufacturers like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia typically unveil noteworthy announcements. However, not all revelations are created equal. This year, AMD's updates for its Ryzen CPUs lean towards the latter, featuring only slight enhancements to previously released models. The spotlight is on the newly introduced Ryzen AI 400 series, which serves as a successor to the Ryzen AI 300 chips launched in mid-2024. While these new processors come with modest improvements, such as higher clock speeds and enhanced memory support, they are fundamentally based on the same architecture as their predecessors. For instance, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 boasts a peak boost clock speed of 5.2 GHz, a slight increase from the 5.1 GHz of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. Additionally, it supports LPDDR5x-8533 memory, an upgrade from LPDDR5x-8000. The chips are also equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU) that can execute 60 trillion operations per second (TOPS), compared to 50 TOPS in the previous generation. Despite these incremental changes, the Ryzen AI 400 series remains constructed using the same technology as the Ryzen AI 300. This includes a mix of high-performance Zen 5 CPU cores alongside more efficient Zen 5c cores, and integrated GPU cores based on the RDNA 3 architecture, all built on TSMC’s 4 nm process. Historically, AMD has followed this pattern of minor upgrades, as seen with the Ryzen 8040 laptop series, which offered similar enhancements over the older 7040 series. Consequently, consumers who can find a good deal on the Ryzen AI 300 systems may not miss out on much by opting for the previous generation.