In our final CES 2026 Q&A session for Tom's Hardware Premium, we had the opportunity to sit down with AMD in Las Vegas, Nevada, to discuss the evolving PC hardware landscape and how products like the Ryzen AI 400 might make a splash over the coming year.
If you've not checked out our previous rounds of transcripts, be sure to catch up with our FSR Redstone roundtable transcript, AMD ROCm transcript, Jensen Huang Q&A, and Intel Panther Lake Q&A.
As ever, elements of this transcript have been lightly edited for flow and clarity. In the weeks following this roundtable, we have also reviewed AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU, so if you're wondering about how AMD's claims stack up to real-world tests, be sure to check it out.
AMD Representative: ... a little bit about the Ryzen AI 400 box, but that's not my primary area of expertise. I think from a component, CPU, a graphics standpoint, yes there is the 9850X3D that was part of the announcement (although not included in the keynote yesterday) that will be a new product that comes into the AM5 portfolio, that really will complement the existing 9800X3D and market. I think as we look at that product and its performance, there are certain games and workloads that really respond to the higher frequency, and so it was one of those things where, just kind of as we've been gaining more experience with our X3D products, and with the 9000 Series X3D products in particular, we took the opportunity to bump the clocks on that a little bit, and deliver a part that I think will be another choice for gamers who play more of those frequency-sensitive eSports titles and things like that, in addition to the games that our X3D products really excel at already.
You know, outside of that, on the graphics side, while we didn't announce anything new at CES, most of what we did on the graphics side really was in the run-up to CES, last year, with the introduction of FSR Redstone, and a host of new technologies that augment our FSR portfolio, bringing in, you know radiance caching, frame generation, and a handful of things like that to continue the progress on our FSR journey. I think we see that as a key part of the portfolio going forward; you'll continue to see us investing in and growing the capabilities, and part of that as well is utilizing things like GPUOpen to proliferate that throughout the gaming ecosystem and developers who may not have been on that first wave of games that those technologies get integrated into.
(Image credit: Future)
And then I think maybe the last topic to talk about a little bit before we just open it up for a little bit more free-form discussion is, you know, one of the products that we didn't make a lot of noise about last year that's starting to get a little bit more traction is the Radeon AI Pro R9700, which is a 32-gigabyte version of our Navi 4 products. It really comes in a couple of different flavors: one that is sort of a workstation form factor, dual-slot full-length card, actively cooled, and then late last year, we also introduced two versions of that card that are passively cooled cards designed to go into a server form factor platform, either as a dual-slot full-length card or as a single-slot card. And I think that's kind of complemented with the release of ROCm 7.2, which will come in January, supporting both the Ryzen AI and AI Pro 400 products, the Ryzen AI Max products, and our Radeon and Radeon Pro products out of the box. That includes both the standard 9000 series as well as the 9070 cards, both in the Windows ecosystem as well as the Linux ecosystem.
Maybe sort of last-but-not-least, just kind of recapping some of the things that we've been doing on the AI front, just to simplify that experience is, in our Adrenaline software stack we're now [including] the AI software bundle, just trying to make it easier for people to access the tools, to experiment with and use AI on either their notebooks with integrated graphics, or Strix Halo type products, or discrete graphics systems. That's really intended to be kind of an 'easy button' that pulls all of the tools and frameworks that are needed to just, out of the box, run AI workloads on our GPUs, and do it in a way where it lowers the bar for entry for more people to have that experience on their system.
To talk about the keynote a little bit, I think that one of the things that in more the client and gaming section of the keynote, one of the things that I think is really important and really interesting is this migration of models from the cloud down to local devices. I think that whether you're a creator or whether you're trying to run agents locally on private, proprietary data, we see an enormous amount of interest, of traction in that right now, we think that that is one of the trends that is really going to accelerate in 2026. And it spans from being able to do those capabilities on a notebook, like some of the things you saw last night, to dev platforms like the Halo box, all the way up to single or multiple R9700 parts in a system to tackle a much bigger workload. I think that whether it's individuals trying to do that, or developers, or even sort of departmental deployment of that as a workgroup AI solution within a business, we think that's going to be one of the significant trends that really shapes demand for those products in 2026.
So, with that, maybe I'll pause for a minute and see if you guys have any questions or things that are on your mind that you want to talk about.
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