By Kyle Barr
Publication Date: 2026-05-21 00:00:00
AMD is trying to give Nvidia’s long-rumored laptop CPUs a run for their money before they’re even out the door. To do this, AMD is making its most powerful processor with the latest Ryzen AI Halo chips that—hopefully—won’t be a no-show like its recent Ryzen AI 400 laptop CPUs.
The newly revealed Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 chip seems like a beast, at least on paper. The main draw is the newer Zen 5 CPU, which features 16 cores and 32 threads with a boost clock speed of 5.2GHz. However, the new chip has the same old RDNA 3.5 GPU microarchitecture that’s inside the previous-generation Ryzen AI Max+ 395. That Radeon 8065S graphics chip includes 40 compute units (the name AMD gives to its core clusters). It should also get a small boost with up to 160GB of possible VRAM (video random access memory), pushing the GPU memory further than before.
Without AMD’s latest RDNA 4 GPU microarchitecture, it’s hard to call it a huge jump in possible performance compared to the Ryzen Max+ 300 series. AMD claims the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 is its first x86 processor that can run a 300 billion parameter AI model all by itself. AMD also promoted two other versions of the same APU (accelerated processing unit, which combines CPU and GPU capabilities). There’s a Ryzen AI Max Pro 490 with 12 cores and 24 threads, plus a Ryzen AI Max Pro 485 with eight cores and 16 threads. The lower-spec models use a smaller GPU with only 32 compute units.
The reason why…
