AMD today announced the Ryzen AI 400G series desktop APUs, its second Socket AM5 APU generation following the Ryzen 8000G series. Built on the 4nm Gorgon Point silicon with Zen 5 microarchitecture, these chips mark a significant shift toward AI performance with an XDNA 2 NPU delivering 50 TOPS of throughput. This makes the Ryzen AI 400G series the first socketed desktop processor meeting Microsoft Copilot+ requirements.

The new APUs feature a dual-CCX design, with four full-sized Zen 5 cores and four compacted Zen 5c cores. The Zen 5c cores are physically smaller but maintain identical IPC and ISA, though they cap out at roughly two-thirds the maximum boost frequency of full-sized Zen 5 cores. Thread migration between CCX requires passing through the Infinity Fabric interconnect, similar to the older Zen 2 architecture days.

AMD hasn't fully unlocked the Gorgon Point silicon in the desktop lineup. The top Ryzen AI 7 450G uses 4 Zen 5 and 4 Zen 5c cores, while the fully unlocked version contains 12 cores total. Interestingly, the iGPU configuration prioritizes the NPU, with the flagship model featuring only 8 GPU compute units—half of what's physically available on the chip. This design choice suggests AMD is positioning these APUs as AI-focused processors rather than traditional graphics powerhouses.