You’re going to be far more interested in AMD’s Ryzen Max than the Ryzen 400 series.
Intel and Qualcomm are both coming to CES 2026, beating the drum hard for their next-gen lightweight laptop CPUs. Meanwhile, AMD is slipping into the party through the back door with its usual laid-back swagger, showcasing a range of new CPUs for laptops, desktops, and gaming-specific devices. The first on the list is the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series that you’ll find in a metric ton of laptops at this year’s showcase.
The AI 400 series, like 2024’s 300 series, is designed to power this generation of Copilot+ PCs. They’re running on Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture and top out with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 with a 12-core, 24-thread configuration. The CPU hits a 5.2GHz boost clock, and AMD promised this CPU should be slightly better at multitasking than the previous generation. The new chip’s GPU isn’t packing any of the most recent RDNA 4 GPU architecture (which means no official access to AMD’s Redstone upscaler), but instead includes 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores with a 3.1 GHz boost clock.
The highest-end CPU also comes with an NPU that hits 60 TOPS, which stands for trillions of operations per second. It’s a derived value that only vaguely approximates AI processing capabilities, so you really shouldn’t spend too much time comparing it to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2’s 80 TOPS NPU.
