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Some observers watching the AMD keynote at CES 2026 might have been curious as to why AMD, a chipmaker, was apparently launching a mini PC. The AMD Ryzen AI Halo looked swish, no doubt, but the company leaves PC manufacturing to its customers. What’s going on?
To find out the answer to this, amongst many other things, I interviewed AMD GM for the Client Business Unit, Rahul Tikoo, at CES 2026. As the dust settles on the world’s biggest tech show, here are the edited highlights.
And if you just want to read about the Ryzen AI Halo, feel free to jump to the bottom of this page.
To paraphrase Prince, most IT managers need another AI PC like they need a hole in the head. But guess what: you have little choice. Whether you choose AMD, Intel or Qualcomm, the business laptops you buy this year will almost certainly support AI thanks to their built-in NPUs.
And even if IT managers are more concerned with battery life and slimline form factors than they are with AI, everyone from the chipmakers to laptop manufacturers to software developers sees artificial intelligence as the future. And, as rapidly became clear during the interview, Rahul Tikoo agrees.
“I mean, I’ve been meeting with customers,” said Tikoo. “Everyone is super excited about AI PCs and continuing to ramp the ISV infrastructure, or the software experience infrastructure.
“We just showed a couple of examples [of AI applications] on stage, but there’s probably close to 100+ examples that we have of things people can do now. People ask me, is there one killer application? No, probably not. There’s lots of small things that people are integrating into their workflows. And then, just like touch [screens], you can’t live without it.”
The other side of Tikoo’s argument is that NPUs are being built into all mainstream laptop chips from now on. This is impossible to disagree with: aside from the cheapest models, commercial laptops in 2026 will include an NPU. The opposite is true for desktop PCs, although AMD will launch a desktop CPU with an NPU this year.
“Even if you don’t use AI, just having a modern PC versus what they had five years ago, and all it can do for them. That’s great, right? That’s what we want in the ecosystem and so that’s been driving a lot of our growth.”
Growth that has led AMD to gain market share for commercial laptops, all stolen from Intel. “Commercial [has been] really, really, really strong growth for us,” said Tikoo. “We’re growing at multiples to market growth, which means we’re taking share, but we’re still very under penetrated.”
That’s because, historically, AMD was to be found in very few commercial laptops. Something Tikoo knows, as he was in control of Dell’s line for almost a decade – six month after he arrived at AMD in mid-2024 Dell announced AMD inside its commercial laptops for the first time (as I discussed with him an in-depth interview last year).
Before this deal, AMD was missing out on roughly a third of the market. “It’s been the fastest ramp that AMD has seen in the PC side,” said Tikoo of 2025’s performance, after the Dell deal. “It’s been a super fast ramp for us. We’re going to be a very reasonable part of their business. Again, it takes time to go build commercial customers up, but we won lots of Fortune 500 accounts with Dell already.”
In terms of CPU launches, AMD had a relatively quiet CES. We saw a new gaming chip for desktop PCs, new Ryzen AI Max+ chips and a modest upgrade of its Ryzen AI 300 processors to Ryzen AI 400. But with the same architecture and a minor bump to its NPU, there was nothing to set pulses racing. Especially when Intel finally launched its Core Ultra Series 3 chips. This is also the year where we will see laptops based on Qualcomm’s second-generation Elite chips for laptops.
“Look, I mean Qualcomm, kudos to them for continuing to fight the good fight,” said Tikoo. “But ARM is a big challenge in this marketplace, just because of the application compatibility.” We should point out that Qualcomm would raise its eyebrows at that, having put a lot of work into compatibility over the past 18 months.
“I feel really good about our Gorgon [Ryzen AI 400] portfolio,” said Tikoo. “Of course, we haven’t had a chance to get our hands on the competitive products yet, but everything that we heard [at CES] did not surprise us.”
He added that “Gorgon is going to be a super competitive-product in the mainstream client portfolio for us. So I don’t see any issues there at all.”
I also asked Rahul Tikoo about the shift to mini PCs. Is this a trend that AMD is seeing? “Even a few years back, as I was running PC business at a system manufacturer [he means Dell], the market had already transitioned from large desktops into small form factors and micro form factor desktops.
“Gone were the days when people were like, hey, I want a desktop because I want to upgrade. There’s a very small class of those users now, right? It’s more enthusiasts, gamers, creators kind of spaces. Most people buy a desktop and they never want to see it again, it’s just sitting and running.”
Tikoo draws a parallel between what happened with laptops around a decade ago. “There was a time, a few years back, where mobile shifted into two categories, high performance and thin-and-light. And it’s the same inflections that you see in desktops.”
This ties in with AMD’s announcement of the Ryzen AI Max+ SKUs at CES. “We’re seeing so much interest, not just from developers, but from gamers, from creators.”
Their interest was stimulated by the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, which AMD describes as “a powerful, easy-to-use mini-PC that brings Ryzen AI Max+ performance to AI developers with an out-of-the-box experience designed to accelerate AI innovation at the edge”. It’s what you see Tikoo holding at the top of this page.
“There were three things we wanted to accomplish [with the Ryzen AI Halo]”, he explained. “Anyone can do the hardware design, right? So that was not the trick here. The trick was, how can we tightly integrate all of the software that developers use, whether it’s frameworks like PyTorch, Onyx, all of the foundational large language models, because it’s hard right?”
He added: “I was talking to a very smart CTO at a very large company, and he was trying to use ComfyUI, and he was like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I spent the whole weekend trying to put it and it did work.”
So that was AMD’s first aim: to give developers a ready-made package that just works, software and all. “And then we’re going to maintain the software package on it, because this thing is changing all the time right now.”
The second thing? To “drive the right price point”, said Tikoo. “If you look at some of the developer boxes out there, not from AMD, I’m talking about our competition, the price points are ridiculous.”
Finally, AMD wanted to “get more developers on our platform. In fact, I would call it the number one priority,” said Tikoo. “It’s like, how do I get more developers developing for me versus the other guy? And so if I can use this and seed the developer base with this and use our partners, OEMs, distributors, channel, to give them this, then we have a better chance of them using it and developing on the AMD platform.
“There’s more to come on that – there will be more announcements around what we’re doing here, more partnerships. So we’re very excited about it. But it’s not about the hardware.”
