AMD and Microsoft drop Project Zenith, a plug-and-code Windows 11 setup

Project Zenith is no longer a demo. AMD and Microsoft put the ready-to-code Windows 11 experience on sale today, pre-installed on the AMD Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform, which runs on the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 processor. The pair first showed it off at IFA 2026.

The whole pitch is skipping the boring part. Zenith arrives with Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Azure CLI, Python, Node.js, .NET, PowerShell 7 and Windows Subsystem for Linux already in place, plus Windows settings tuned for development. Developers can still reshape the environment around their own frameworks and tools.

AMD is stacking its own software on top. The Ryzen AI Developer Center manages the pre-installed stack and syncs it with AMD's validated configurations, while AMD AI Playbooks walk developers through running large language models with PyTorch and ROCm, generating images in ComfyUI, and coding with local LLMs via Visual Studio Code and Qwen3-Coder. LM Studio and n8n round out the supported lineup.

The hardware is aimed at big models on a desk. Ryzen AI Halo carries up to 192GB of unified memory, 160GB of it available to graphics, with 273 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD says that's enough to run models up to 300 billion parameters locally, with long context windows and multi-model workflows, on x86 silicon that stays compatible with existing apps.

Anyone who already owns a Ryzen AI Halo device isn't locked out. AMD points them to Microsoft's Windows Developer Config on GitHub to rebuild the same setup by hand.