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 news to announce at CES to kick off the year, but some of these 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 old silicon intended to pad out a lineup or make an existing architecture look newer and more exciting than it is.

AMD’s Ryzen processor announcements this year fall firmly into the latter camp: they’re all slightly tweaked chip variants launching in 2024 and 2025.

“New”, for certain values ​​of “new”

Let’s start with the Ryzen AI 400 series. Officially followed by the Ryzen AI 300 chips announced in June 2024, these processors offer modest clock speed improvements and faster memory support. The new Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 has a maximum clock speed of 5.2 GHz and supports LPDDR5x-8533, for example, compared to 5.1 GHz and LPDDR5x-8000 for the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and its integrated neural processing unit (NPU) is capable of 60 trillion operations per second (TOPS) instead of 50 TOPS.

But beyond these modest tweaks, the Ryzen AI 400 chips are built 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, between 4 and 16 integrated GPU cores based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture and a 4nm TSMC manufacturing process.

This is not new behavior from AMD. A few CPU generations ago (and a CPU naming scheme ago), the company did the same thing with the Ryzen 8040 series laptop chips, improving on the older 7040 series with slightly higher clock speeds and not much else. The bottom line is that if you can get a decent discount on a Ryzen AI 300 system because it’s “old”, you can buy it without missing out on much.