Lisa Su’s keynote just wrapped up at CES 2026 and in turn the embargo regarding AMD’s first consumer product announcements for 2026. The AMD Ryzen AI 400 series and new Ryzen 7 9850X3D 3D V-Cache processors are what’s in focus for CES this year.
Up first is the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series, which amounts to a refresh of the Ryzen AI 300 series. The AMD Ryzen AI 400 series continue to be built atop Zen 5 but now squeezing out slightly better performance thanks to higher clock speeds. AMD Ryzen AI 300 series has already been battling and typically dominating the Intel Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake laptop processors, especially under Linux. Now with the Ryzen AI 400 series AMD is better positioned in anticipation of the Intel Panther Lake laptops coming to market this year.
The AMD Ryzen AI 400 series over the AI 300 series can now boost up to 5.2GHz, the RDNA3.5 graphics can now boost up to 3.1GHz, the XDNA2 NPU supports up to 60 AI TOPS, and there is support for up to DDR5 8533 MT/s. A nice incremental upgrade for those on older laptop models while waiting for next-gen Zen 6 laptops.
The Ryzen AI 400 series is no real reason to upgrade if currently on a Ryzen AI 300 series device but now is a better option for those on a several year old laptop and wanting to upgrade in 2026. It will be interesting to see how the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series competes with the upcoming Intel Panther Lake laptops. The first AMD Ryzen AI 400 series laptops should be out later this quarter. Hopefully we’ll have some hardware in the lab soon enough for Linux compatibility and performance benchmarking.
AMD also announced at CES an expansion of their wonderful Strix Halo family. Adding to the Ryzen AI Max+ line-up is now a 12-core / 24-thread Ryzen AI Max+ 392 that features 40 graphics CPUs to align with the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395. With the Ryzen AI Max+ 392 it’s basically the 12-core CPU design of the Ryzen AI Max 390 but with the beefier graphics from the Ryzen AI Max+ 395. Similarly, the Ryzen AI Max+ 388 is an 8-core / 16-thread Zen 5 CPU but with the 40 CPU top-end graphics. Some nice additions t the Ryzen AI Max line-up and hopefully we’ll be seeing more Ryzen AI Max laptops/SFF PCs coming to market this year.
Given the ongoing obsession with AI, AMD did promote their ROCm improvements over the past year — including the expanded Linux distribution support and more performance.
On the desktop side, AMD announced the Ryzen 7 9850X3D as an upgrade to their fastest gaming process. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is still 8 core / 16 threads with 104MB cache like the 9800X3D, but now with a 5.6GHz boost clock frequency. The +400MHz to the boost clock is the Ryzen 7 9850X3D to help better position this gaming-focused desktop CPU ahead of Intel’s next-generation Nova Lake processors and any Arrow Lake refresh.
Over on the enterprise side, AMD also announced the Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series and Ryzen AI Embedded X100 series. The Ryzen AI Embedded P100 series offers up to 6 or 12 cores depending upon the immersive experience or industrial automation segements, respectively.
The Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series offers up to 16 Zen 5 cores. The P100 series will be available in the first half of this year while the X100 Series will be out in the back half of the year.
The Ryzen AI EMbedded P100/X100 Series are BGA-based and succeed the prior Ryzen Embedded 8000 series products. In addition to the Zen 5 CPU cores, these new offerings sport XDNA 2 NPUs and RDNA 3.5 graphics.
Lisa also teased at CES that the next-gen Instinct MI500 series coming out in 2027 will target up to 1,000x the AI performance of the Instinct MI300X hardware. The AMD Instinct MI430X and MI440X were also further detailed today as well as their Helios rack-scale system.
Those are the main announcements out of AMD for CES 2026. Now to get some of the new hardware in the lab for Linux performance benchmarking and compatibility/support testing.
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