AMD’s new CPU line-up at CES 2026 reveals its AI focus
Improvements against the previous AI 300 series lie mostly in a new NPU, while the AI Halo box looks set to compete against Nvidia’s DGX Spark.
In tandem with the unveiling of its Ryzen 7 9850X3D chip, AMD also announced a slate of new AI-related products at CES. Chief among them are the Ryzen AI 400 and AI PRO 400 series of CPUs, and a new mini PC dubbed the Ryzen AI Halo that’s geared towards local AI development.
The AI 400 series, a small step up for the Ryzen AI line
The AI 400 series is still based on Zen 5, with most of the improvements coming from a new NPU.
As you might expect, the AI 400 chips are the successor to AMD’s AI 300 series, which perhaps was due for a refresh on account of it being about 18 months old now. On paper, the basic specs are the same, being 4nm chips built on up to 12 Zen 5 cores and utilising Radeon 800M series integrated GPUs.
However, the new XDNA 2 NPUs in the refreshed chips are now rated to provide up to 60 TOPS of AI compute power, compared to the maximum 50 TOPS of the last generation. There are seven new CPUs in the standard Ryzen AI 400 lineup, ranging from the 4-core and 8-thread Ryzen AI 5 430 to the 12-core Ryzen AI 9 HX 475.
Clock speeds for the higher-end chips see a small increase in their boost frequencies, up to 5.2 GHz instead of last generation’s 5.1 GHz. The boost frequencies for the lower-end chips remain at 4.5 GHz, while the Ryzen AI 7 445, an indirect successor to the Ryzen AI 7 340, actually has its boost frequency decreased to 4.6 GHz.
The AI PRO 400 chips come in six SKUs.
The AI PRO 400 chips, AMD’s more enterprise-oriented solutions within the new CPUs, aren’t that far off, either. There’s six new chips on offer, also going up to 12 cores and 24 threads on the highest-end Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 475. The NPU in the PRO series also goes up to 60 TOPS.
AMD PRO Technologies, the suite of enterprise features on which include hardware encryption and tackle manageability, remain the focus for the AI PRO chips.
AMD might also be teasing a socketed CPU in the AI lineup.
Laptops equipped with the AI 400 series are slated to ship in Q1 2026, with manufacturers including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Gigabyte and Lenovo. Desktops with the new chips will ship in Q2; on that point, based on the above slide, AMD might also be releasing a socketed CPU in the AI 400 series, specifically teasing the “first desktop Copilot+ processor” in its press materials. There’s no details on that yet, however.
Ryzen AI Halo, a SFF AI workstation
The Ryzen AI Halo comes with the company’s AI Max+ 395 chip and up to 128GB of unified memory.
AMD also took time out of its CES presentation to unveil the AMD-badged Ryzen AI Halo mini PC, its attempt at a compact workstation for AI developers.
To that end, it’s equipped the PC with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395, currently the highest-end AI Max chip in the lineup. It also comes with up to 128GB of unified memory shared between the CPU, GPU (an integrated Radeon 8060S) and NPU. On the software side, it supports booting into Windows and Linux, and is pre-loaded with tools, including models like OpenAI’s GPT-OSS and Black Forest Labs’s FLUX.2, along with apps such as LM Studio.
Overall, this does appear to be Team Red’s response to a similar effort by Nvidia to create a small, local development workstation, the DGX Spark. There certainly are comparisons to be drawn, such as the 128GB of memory, and the claim of running models with up to 200 billion parameters. However, certain details about the AI Halo still missing, such as storage and its pricing. We do know, though that it will release in Q2 2026.