AMD Shows Off Gorgon Halo Ryzen AI Max 400 Series At Its Advancing AI 2026 Event
As we have mentioned in the past, Gorgon Halo is a mild refresh of Strix Halo, which is the foundation of the Ryzen AI Max 300 series. These processors power devices like the current-gen AMD Ryzen AI Halo small form factor AI development system as well as the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 tablet, just to name a couple. The Gorgon Halo-based Ryzen AI Max 400 series ups the ante versus its predecessor with tweaked voltage-frequency curves and increased memory capacity to boost performance and enable larger AI models to run locally, on-device.
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Similar to the Ryzen AI Max 300 series, the Ryzen AI Max 400 series will initially consist of three models. The top end Ryzen AI Max+ 495 comes with 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units, the midrange Max 490 gets 12 CPU cores and 32 GPU CUs, and then the Max 485 has just eight cores and the same 32 CU Radeon 8050S Graphics as the 490. Technically, there are six total models in the 400 series lineup, three standard Ryzen AI Max 400 and three Max PRO 400 series processors, but their base specifications are identical. The only difference between the PRO and non-PRO models is support for AMD’s enterprise manageability features.
There are a few things that differentiate the Ryzen AI Max 300 and 400 series. The top-end model gets a 100MHz higher max boost frequency for both the CPU and GPU. Additionally, AMD has verified Ryzen AI Max 400 series platforms to support up to 192GB of RAM operating at up to LPDDR5X-8533—the 300 series tops out at LPDDR5X-8000. That's a 50% bump in capacity with a 6.6% increase in frequency over the Ryzen AI Max 300 series, and while you might think that isn’t significant, AMD is positioning these chips primarily as AI development and workstation processors. The increased memory capacity and speed is meaningful in that context, because it will allow larger models to be run locally, on device. AMD calls the Ryzen AI 400 Max series the "world's first x86 client processor to run 300B+ LLMs".
A Second Generation Ryzen AI Halo Device Is On The Way
The Ryzen AI Max 400 series will also be the foundation of AMD’s second-generation Ryzen AI Halo development platform. That's AMD’s direct competitor the NVIDIA DGX Spark; you can read our deep-dive review of the original model here.
The upcoming Ryzen AI Halo with Gorgon Halo seems to be physically identical to the original version as a small form factor system that comes in slightly under 1 liter in size. It will feature a Ryzen AI Max+ 495 processor with 192GB of unified memory, Wi-Fi 7, a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and your choice of Windows 11 or Linux.
The current Ryzen AI Halo starts at $3,999 USD and is available now. Pricing hasn’t been revealed for the updated version based on the Ryzen AI Max+ 495 just yet, but we should find out soon. It is on the way and should be available just a bit later in the second half of this year.
