A shipping manifest listing printed circuit board components designed for AMD's upcoming Strix Halo mobile APU has been discovered (reported by harukaze5719 on X). The specs also reveal the chip's TDP and memory capacity, which are 120W and 64GB, respectively.
The system components are part of a prototype system AMD is potentially using to test its new Zen 5-based Strix Halo mobile APU. But the most intriguing information from the manifest is the APU's TDP and memory capacity. The massive 120W TDP and 64GB of memory back up previous rumors that Strix Halo will be a performance-oriented chip aimed at competing with Apple's M3 and M4 silicon.
Strix Halo?https://t.co/WVAsColA7w pic.twitter.com/guqZ1uBVOHMay 10, 2024
Strix Halo is the codename for this upcoming monster AMD Zen 5 chip. The chip will be an alternative variant of AMD's mainstream Strix Point mobile CPUs, which will be the actual successors to AMD's outgoing Ryzen 8000 mobile CPUs. Strix Halo will be the first chip of its kind, combining high-end CPU specs with PlayStation 5-like integrated graphics capabilities.
Rumors suggest that at least one of the Strix Halo models (if there are more than one) will sport a whopping 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, an unheard-of 40 Compute Unit RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics chip, and a 45 - 50 TOPS capable XDNA NPU. Memory is also rumored to be extremely potent, featuring a mid-range GPU like 256-bit wide bus sporting 8533MHz LPDDR5X, equating to 500GB/s of memory bandwidth.
The extremely high 120W TDP (for a mobile chip) and 64GB of memory start to make sense when you consider the sky-high specs Strix Halo is rumored to be carrying. It's not uncommon for outgoing Intel mobile chips to consume as much as 75-100W in bursty workloads, so a 120W TDP for a 16-core chip and a monster iGPU combined is very likely.
At first glance, 64GB looks like too much memory, but Strix Halo won't be aimed purely at gamers. It will also be aimed at power users and professionals who will be using the chip for content creation, AI-based workloads, 3D rendering, and other heavy-duty workloads. For these types of workloads, 64GB is an optional memory capacity. Still, we can expect official Strix Halo systems to be configured with a range of memory configurations other than 64GB.
We still don't have much concrete data on Strix Point, but the power and memory specs revealed by this latest shipping manifest back up previous rumors about its daunting specifications. All signs point to Strix Point (no pun intended) being the most powerful mobile APU AMD ever to compete with ARM competition from Apple and Qualcomm.
