Intel, AMD, Nvidia and other chip makers usually announce some news at CES early in 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 updated versions of older chips designed to complement the lineup or make an existing architecture seem newer and more interesting than it really is.
AMD's Ryzen processors announced this year fall firmly into the latter camp—all slightly tweaked variants of chips released in 2024 and 2025.
“New” for certain meanings of “new”.
These Ryzen AI 400 series chips are slightly faster than the Ryzen AI 300 series processors, but are otherwise functionally identical to them.
AMD
These Ryzen AI 400 series chips are slightly faster than the Ryzen AI 300 series processors, but are otherwise functionally identical to them.
AMD
Slightly higher CPU clocks, NPU speeds, and supported RAM frequencies will differentiate the Ryzen AI 400 from the Ryzen AI 300.
AMD
Slightly higher CPU clocks, NPU speeds, and supported RAM frequencies will differentiate the Ryzen AI 400 from the Ryzen AI 300.
AMD
These Ryzen AI 400 series chips are slightly faster than the Ryzen AI 300 series processors, but are otherwise functionally identical to them.
AMD
Slightly higher CPU clocks, NPU speeds, and supported RAM frequencies will differentiate the Ryzen AI 400 from the Ryzen AI 300.
AMD
Main characteristics of the new chips.
AMD
Main characteristics of the new chips.
AMD
Eligible Ryzen Pro chips for business PCs.
AMD
Eligible Ryzen Pro chips for business PCs.
AMD
Main characteristics of the new chips.
AMD
Eligible Ryzen Pro chips for business PCs.
AMD
Let's start with the Ryzen AI 400 series. The official continuation of the Ryzen AI 300 chips. announced June 2024these processors offer some modest improvements in clock speed and support for faster memory. The new Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 has a peak 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) rather than 50 TOPS.
But beyond these modest changes, 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, 4 to 16 integrated GPU cores based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture and TSMC's 4nm manufacturing process.
This is not new behavior from AMD. A couple of processor generations ago (and one processor naming scheme ago), the company did the same thing with Chips for Ryzen 8040 series laptopsembellishing old series 7040 with slightly higher clock speeds and nothing more. As a result, if you can get a decent discount on a Ryzen AI 300 system because it's “old”, you can buy it without losing much.
