AMD's Ryzen AI 400 chips are a big boost for laptops and desktops alike
The whole AI PC trend didn't exactly set the world on fire last year, but, like clockwork, AMD is still ready to deliver a new batch of AI chips at CES 2026. The Ryzen AI 400 processors will offer some slight speed upgrades over last year's chips, and notably, they also include AMD's first Copilot+ processors for desktops. Sure, the Copilot+ program didn't really go anywhere, but as I've argued, it at least served as a template for building capable AI PCs. Now we just need some genuinely useful AI features in Windows — Recall and Copilot's voice commands aren't really compelling enough on their own.
AMD's first AI desktop chips, the Ryzen 8000G series, arrived in 2024 with relatively underpowered neural processing units (NPUs) for AI tasks. The Ryzen AI 400 chips, on the other hand, feature 60 TOPS XDNA 2 NPUs (up from the 50 to 55 TOPS in Ryzen AI 300 hardware). That places them well above the 40 TOPS NPU minimum for Copilot+ systems. For most consumers, NPU speeds don't really mean much yet, but if you're running AI models on your system you can expect slightly faster inferencing from AMD's previous chips.
The top-end Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 offers up to 12 Zen 5 CPU cores, 5.2GHz max boost speeds and up to 8,533 MT/s memory speeds. The line scales down to the four-core Ryzen AI 5 430, but even that model supports speedy 8,000 MTS RAM and offers a 50 TOPS NPU.
AMD isn't giving us many specific details on the Ryzen AI 400 chips at CES, but broadly, it claims they'll offer up to 30 percent faster multi-tasking, 70 percent faster content creation and 10 percent faster gaming than its previous chips. The company also says you'll see 70 percent better "unplugged connectivity" on Cinebench nT, which is hopefully a sign that you'll see improved performance overall on battery.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/amds-ryzen-ai-400-chips-are-a-big-boost-for-laptops-and-desktops-alike-033000635.html?src=rss
