The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is only one of the chips Team Red announced at CES 2026—and the others might have Intel sweating

AMD’s next-generation desktop processors still don’t have a confirmed launch date, but Team Red isn’t done with this generation just yet, unveiling the Ryzen 7 9850X3D at CES 2026 along with a host of other chips.

Starting with the 9850X3D, it is essentially a faster version of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, featuring the same number of cores, the same cache and TDP, but with an extra 400MHz max frequency. That might not sound like a whole lot, but the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is arguably the best gaming processor ever released, so making it even faster is going to garner a lot of interest.

I will say, though, that the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is going to be largely overshadowed by the other major CES announcement from AMD, specifically the Ryzen AI 400 series laptop processors. As Team Red’s answer to the new Intel Core Ultra 300 series processors announced last year, these chips are looking to take some of the wind out of Intel's sails to start off the year.

The AMD Ryzen AI 400 series is here to bring the fight to Intel Panther Lake

With a lot of anticipation around the new Intel Core Ultra 300 series, AMD is picking the right time to launch its new lineup of mobile chips.

At the top of the stack, you have the Ryzen AI 9 HX 475, a 12-core/24-thread chip with a boost clock of 5.2GHz, up to 54W cTDP, 36MB of cache, and a 60 TOPS NPU, which AMD notes is the most powerful x86 NPU you can get. Rounding it out is a Radeon 890M iGPU with 16 compute units and a GPU boost clock of 3.1GHz.

The next step down is the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470, which looks almost identical to the HX 475 except for a slightly slower NPU with 55 TOPS. The rest of the stack fills out as expected, as you can see below.

I can’t say much about the performance claims AMD is making for these processors in their presentations and press materials, such as the purported 71% faster average performance in content creation or the 29% faster average multitasking performance for the HX 470 versus the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V.

It’s a bit of an odd comparison, since the 288V is an Intel Lunar Lake chip meant for thin and light laptops, as opposed to the more powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX, which is really the more appropriate comparison here, since these are the chips you’d find in gaming and creator laptops.

Will that make all that much difference in the end? We'll see once we get them all in for testing in the coming months, as the numbers will ultimately tell the tale.

AMD's new chips offer more than just added AI noise in 2026

As expected, the new lineup of AMD processors at CES 2026 leans heavily into the current AI ‘environment’ and for a lot of PC enthusiasts and gamers out there hoping for more, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D might not be enough to fully satisfy consumers.

However, the mobile landscape certainly looks much more competitive for Intel as laptop makers get ready to launch Intel Panther Lake-powered laptops over the next few months, and there’s a lot to be excited about if you’re looking to upgrade your laptop in 2026.

TechRadar will be extensively covering this year's CES, and will bring you all of the big announcements as they happen. Head over to our CES 2026 news page for the latest stories and our hands-on verdicts on everything from wireless TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI.

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