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

Intel, AMD, Nvidia and other chip companies usually have some kind of news to announce at CES to start the year, but some of those announcements are more interesting than others. Sometimes you see new chips with significant speed increases and other new technologies, and sometimes you get rebranded versions of older silicon meant to fill out a lineup or make an existing architecture seem newer and more exciting than it was.

AMD’s Ryzen CPU announcements this year fall firmly into the latter camp – they’re all gradually revised versions of chips launching in 2024 and 2025.

For some values ​​of “new,” “new”

Let’s start with the Ryzen AI 400 series. The follow-up to the Ryzen AI 300 chips, officially announced in June 2024, these processors offer some modest clock speed improvements and faster memory support. The new Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 has a maximum boost clock speed of 5.2 GHz and support for LPDDR5x-8533, for example, up from 5.1 GHz for the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and LPDDR5x-8000, and its built-in Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is capable of 60 trillion operations per second (TOPS) instead of 50 TOPS.

But beyond those minor changes, the Ryzen AI 400 chips are constructed from the same building blocks as the Ryzen AI 300. They use a combination of high-performance Zen 5 CPU cores and smaller, more efficient Zen 5c cores and between 4 and 16 integrated GPU cores based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture and the 4 nm TSMC manufacturing process.

This is not new behavior from AMD. A few processor generations ago (and a processor naming scheme earlier), the company did the same thing with Ryzen 8040-series laptop chips, beefing up the older 7040 series with marginally higher clock speeds and not much else. The result is that if you can get a good discount on a Ryzen AI 300 system because it is “older”, you can buy it without losing anything.