AMD has rolled out six Ryzen AI 400 desktop chips for AM5 in 65 W and 35 W flavours, but it is keeping the full-fat Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop part with 12 cores and a Radeon 890M well out of reach.
Like past G-series Ryzen parts, this is notebook silicon repackaged for desktops. Despite the Ryzen AI 400 badge, the specs line up closely with Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors.
The two generations are nearly identical, with one small tweak in the mobile range. Ryzen AI 400-series laptop CPUs get slightly faster 55 TOPS NPUs.
AMD is not shipping its top-end laptop silicon into desktops, at least for now. There is no 12-core option like the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 or 370, and you cannot get the Radeon 880M or Radeon 890M iGPUs.
Today’s three announced models top out at eight CPU cores, likely split between Zen 5 and the smaller, thriftier Zen 5c. Graphics caps at a Radeon 860M with eight RDNA 3.5 compute units.
AMD could drop higher-end options later, but building mini gaming PCs around socket AM5 looks like a bad bet right now. These chips want pairs of fast DDR5 sticks to hit their numbers, and fast DDR5 prices have gone through the roof.
It is hard to make any gaming PC stack up on value, and desktop iGPU frames-per-second-per-dollar is a particularly grim corner. That probably explains why AMD is steering this launch at business desktops first.
This fits what AMD signalled at CES earlier this year, with mild iterations that do not push much. Between RAM and storage shortages and chipmakers fighting for TSMC capacity, the desktop AI party is arriving with lukewarm drinks.
