As we predicted, the world’s biggest consumer electronics show was a bit of a bust for gamers this year! CES 2026 brought us several neat gamepads, but barely any handhelds and no new desktop GPUs — not from Nvidia, not from Intel, and not from AMD.
But if you dig deep, AMD said two things at this year’s show that are worthy of attention. Did you catch that the company’s about to make socketed mobile chips again? Or that its answer to Intel is to lower the price of its monster Strix Halo silicon?
Publicly, AMD barely acknowledged consumers at the Consumer Electronics Show. “AMD failed us,” decried Gamers Nexus, pointing out that the company’s keynote was almost entirely fixated on AI. Outside the keynote, the company’s few consumer-friendly announcements — including the Ryzen 7 9850X3D for gaming desktops and Ryzen AI 400 for laptops — are all retreads of existing components.
AMD also didn’t announce a new chip for handheld gaming PCs, no successor to the Z2 and Z2 Extreme it introduced a year ago, even as Intel publicly announced plans for an “entire handheld gaming platform” and Qualcomm teased its own handhelds for a possible March reveal.
Intel didn’t miss a chance to jab: “They’re selling ancient silicon, while we’re selling up-to-date processors specifically designed for this market,” Intel client product management director Nish Neelalojanan told PCWorld.
Yet AMD claims those so-called “ancient” processors are more than a match for Intel’s new Panther Lake silicon. AMD client chip boss Rahul Tikoo told Tom’s Hardware that AMD’s Strix Halo / Ryzen AI Max chip “will kill” Panther Lake. He said, “It’s not even a fair fight at that point, because it’s discrete-level graphics.”
Tikoo also told Tom’s Hardware that Intel’s gaming-grade Panther Lake chips might be pricier than you expect: “And, oh, by the way, that 12 Xe [Panther Lake]… Wait until you see the price point on that. It’s gonna be, you know. Enough said.”
Price has been the problem with AMD’s Strix Halo too — every powerful Ryzen handheld, mini desktop, and monster tablet we’ve seen has cost around $2,000, even before the RAM crunch. But that brings me to the first exciting thing for gamers AMD quietly revealed at CES: The cost of its powerful Strix Halo systems is almost certainly about to come down.
AMD introduced two new cut-down versions of Strix Halo last week with their full-fat graphics intact; Tikoo told us that gaming companies specifically had been asking for parts like the new Ryzen AI Max Plus 388 and 392.
And when I caught up with AMD’s Jason Banta, who’s in charge of interfacing with those companies, he said AMD genuinely expects the two new chips will lead to lower Strix Halo system prices, below $2,000 even when you factor in the runaway price of RAM. (I asked the question several different ways to be sure of his answer.)
Banta would not tell me if the company has any other plans to defend its tiny handheld empire (the Steam Deck, Xbox Ally, Legion Go, and more all use AMD chips, as do the PlayStation and Xbox) when Intel and Qualcomm come knocking later this year. “We believe imitation is a great form of flattery,” is all he’d really say. “When we’re creating the segment, innovating the segment, we expect others to enter.”
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Banta isn’t afraid of Intel and Qualcomm handheld chips taking his customers away. “What they’ve seen is we’ve proven we can execute, and not just execute: When we see a quirk with a game, we follow up, we update, we optimize. […] That has a very big influence on those design decisions for every one of these OEMs,” he said. Banta said AMD’s handheld business is still growing, too, and the company still plans to keep investing.
Most PC makers don’t seem ready to climb aboard Intel’s handheld bandwagon just yet. If you take a close look at Intel’s keynote slide, the only major vendors listed are Acer and MSI, and the only boutique handheld makers are GPD and OneXPlayer, both still big on AMD. The rest of Intel’s partners (Compal, Foxconn, Inventec, Pegatron, Quanta, and Wistron) aren’t brands, but rather the ODM contract manufacturing companies that’ll be fighting for their business.
While I was chatting with AMD’s Jason Banta at the show, he brought my attention to one more piece of news that was easy to miss. The second potentially exciting thing for gamers is that AMD is making socketed mobile processors again — Ryzen AI 400 laptop chips that aren’t soldered down, but fit into a socket like a desktop CPU, so you can replace or potentially even upgrade them in the future.
He said they’ll begin to appear in desktops in the early part of this year, specifically targeting Q2. Banta thinks socketed mobile chips are going to unlock gaming and productivity designs of all shapes and sizes: “That socketed Ryzen AI 400, we’re expecting to see that everywhere from 1-liter designs all the way to 30-liter designs,” he says. (Mobile processors can be a good match for beefy desktop GPUs, since most games don’t require all that much CPU power at high resolution.)
These socketed chips aren’t just for gamers, mind; it sounds like they were actually targeted at AI PCs to start. “What we’re seeing is folks that want the flexibility of the socketed design, but they want to try out Copilot Plus, they want to try out some local models that can actually leverage the NPU and run directly on that,” he said.
When I asked if the socket means we should expect upgradable laptops, Banta gently throws some cold water on that idea. “In general, what we find is people want the thinnest system they can get, even if they’re enthusiast users,” and that both the socket itself and a socketed CPU’s integrated heat spreader add unwanted thickness to a laptop.
But he seems to think it’ll happen in mini PCs: “What we’re seeing is BGA, LGA, everyone’s experimenting in a lot of different ways within those 1-liter, 2-liter designs, things you can fit on your desk.”
While I didn’t spot a mini PC with a socketed CPU at the show, I bumped into one with tiny modular desktop graphics cards — this Steam Machine competitor from Minisforum — and it makes me excited for a possible future where we can upgrade the CPU, too. Why should only larger PCs be fully upgradable? The new Steam Machine isn’t, and the Framework Desktop requires you to upgrade a whole mainboard at a time, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
For that to happen, though, AMD would also have to sell its socketed mobile processors at retail the way it sells its desktop ones, and AMD’s not yet willing to commit to that today.
“What can I say… we have active partnerships with OEMs on Ryzen AI 400 socketed designs. DIY is not something we’re communicating information about at this time, so more to come later,” Banta said.
