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.
Image: AMD.
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.
