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Like many other CES-timed announcements this week, AMD's opening night address at CES 2026 revolved largely around on-device AI capabilities and new products focused on that sector. Yet on the brute-force rendering side of things, AMD took the opportunity to further cement its claim to the fastest and most easily recommended consumer-grade gaming CPU.

This comes in the form of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, launching in "Q1 2026" at a still-unnamed MSRP, which applies small efficiencies to November 2024's already-scorching Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The same 120W TDP and 96MB L3 cache, and the same Zen 5 allotment of 8 cores and 16 threads, are now clocked to a maximum 5.6GHz boost clock - a 400MHz jump, or roughly 7.7 percent.

Without a substantial jump beyond Zen 5 architecture, we know the Ryzen 7 9000 series can only be pushed so far - though we do find AMD's suggestion of a "2-3 percent" jump in performance from the 9800X3D so scant that it borders on margin-of-error territory. AMD did not take the opportunity to announce any other Ryzen CPU products nor any new Radeon RDNA 4 GPUs.

And its CES-timed messaging about FSR 4 Redstone is little more than a recap of the technologies that have launched so far - with zero firm details about when to expect wider rollouts of its Radiance Caching or Ray Regeneration features, nor any updates about the frame-pacing issues that currently plague its Frame Generation implementation.

AMD's other CES-timed announcements, unsurprisingly, revolved around the Ryzen AI line of APUs for both laptops and desktops. The newly announced Ryzen AI 400 series, built around Zen 5 architecture, is a portable-minded chipset with "optimised low-power architecture." It features dedicated silicon for its "XDNA 2" Neural Processing Unit (NPU), along with a slight graphics-basis downgrade to what AMD has described as RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

Its new desktop-minded Ryzen AI Max+ series, meanwhile, targets smaller-sized desktop chasses with a more demanding APU that has more compute units than the AI 400 line - though those CUs are still limited to RDNA 3.5 architecture.