AMD touts blazing Windows 11 performance benchmarks on Ryzen AI 400 series vs Intel

At its CES 2026 event today, AMD unveiled multiple new products and key announcements including ROCm performance upgrades, a new FSR 4 feature, and the fastest gaming desktop processor in the world, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.

Speaking of processors, Team Red also revealed its brand new Ryzen AI 400 series mobile APUs which will be powering a bunch of new Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs, which, if you are not aware of, are Microsoft's certified AI PCs that can do 40 or more TOPS of AI/ML processing on their dedicated on-board NPUs.

AMD's last gen Ryzen AI 300 series SKUs were already Copilot+ PC-qualified as they could do 50 NPU TOPS; however with this latest generation of products AMD is improving that spec by a significant 20% on the new flagship Ryzen AI 9 HX 475 and by 10% on the second-best Ryzen AI 9 HX 470. Thus the new top two AMD APUs feature up to 60 and 55 NPU TOPS respectively. However, the NPU architecture still remains as XDNA 2 which means there are other enhancements like clock bumps and/or additional NPU compute units.

If you are wondering, NPUs or Neural Processing Units are dedicated AI/ML processors that help hardware accelerate such workloads. Their performance is rated as TOPS based on their INT-8 or 8-bit integer throughput as integer arithmetic units help in faster, more efficient computing of such specialized AI/ML tasks.

The rest of the core specs like the CPU and GPU portions also do not undergo a big change and remain sort of similar compared to Ryzen AI 300 series, though there are minor clock speed bumps. Hence for performance outside of AI work, users will probably not notice that big a difference.

Compared to Intel though AMD is touting some big advantages. The latter claims that with the 28-watt Ryzen AI 9 470H, you can achieve 30% better multi-tasking, 70% faster content creation output, and up to 70% better battery efficiency compared to a 30-watt Intel Core Ultra 9 288V.

The company here has showcased multitasking performance advantage of the 470H against the 288V with promises of up to 30% better showing with the Ryzen chip across various Microsoft Office applications like Word, Outlook, and Excel.

AMD also promises blazing fast creativity capabilities on the Ryzen AI 400 series as the 470H is said to achieve around double the throughput of the Intel 200 series in rendering apps like Blender, Cinebench (Cinema 4D), as well as in video encoding as in Handbrake, and file archiving (compression decompression) as in 7-Zip.

Finally, AMD shared gaming results against the 288V. Both systems were running on Windows 11 Home using LPDDR5X-8533 RAM. Hence, it was a very fair comparison and here, the Radeon 16CU 890M integrated graphics processor (iGP) is said to significantly outperform the Arc 140V onboard Intel graphics in certain titles.

AMD also compared the NPU performance of the 470H against the 288V. However, the image is a bit misleading as it is presented in a way that may suggest the AMD XDNA2 NPU is much faster. However, there is a 5.44% advantage in favor of Team Red. Considering that the Ryzen has a 55 TOP NPU as opposed to Intel's 48 TOPS, it looks like Team Blue may have the edge in terms of NPU optimization.

AMD did not disclose the exact performance of the flagship 475HX but it is safe to presume the performance split will be slightly more in favor of Team Red. Also the testing was conducted on Windows 11 Pro.

AMD did not share any more benchmarks against Intel; though to give a general idea about the advantages of Copilot+ (or "AI-enabled") PCs, the tech giant used its previous generation Ryzen AI 300 series APUs to claim up to 17 times better performance versus not having AI hardware acceleration in things like vibe coding, image generation, and document preparation or similar such digital paperwork.

The full Ryzen AI 400 series APU lineup is given below:

In terms of availability, AMD says that OEM notebook and laptop systems from various partner vendors like Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte, and more will be available in Q1 of 2026.

Source

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Posted Wednesday 7 January 2026 at 6:30 am AEST (my time).

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