With less than one month left to CES 2025, leaked benchmarks have started to surface starring AMD's flagship Strix Halo APUs. The Ryzen AI MAX+ Pro 395 - now that's a mouthful - has emerged on Geekbench packing 16 CPU cores, 64GB of RAM, and a massive 40 CU (Compute Units) Radeon RX 8600S iGPU (Integrated GPU). Despite the apparent low score - set to improve with further optimizations - the real juicy details lie in the specifications.
For the uninitiated, Strix Halo or the Ryzen AI MAX 300 APUs are said to be AMD's top-of-the-line offering for workstations and laptops next year. The test bench utilizes the "AMD MAPLE-STXH" reference board, designed for the FP11 socket. Likewise, Ryzen AI MAX+ Pro 395—which we'll call Ryzen AI 395 for simplicity's sake—is paired with 64GB of RAM, going as high as 128GB per shipping manifests. The performance isn't anything to write home about at this stage, with the Vulkan score on par with an RTX 2060 resulting from early silicon.
In line with previous rumors, the Ryzen AI 395 features 16 cores based on the Zen 5 microarchitecture and 32 threads. The suspected dual-CCD design lands it 32MBx2 (64MB) of L3 cache alongside 16MB of L2 cache (1MB per core). Geekbench lists the maximum clock speeds at 4.4 GHz, which will likely improve with time.
Strix Halo's graphics solution will fall under AMD's Radeon 8000S umbrella of iGPUs: the Radeon 8060S and Radeon 8050S are based on RDNA 3.5. On an architectural level, the iGPU likely resides in the large SoC die with upwards of 32MB of MALL or Infinity Cache to avoid memory bottlenecks. Geekbench doesn't explicitly list the CU count, but previous leaks hint towards a 40 CU configuration for all Radeon 8060S models—25% more than the RX 7600.
Strix Halo is designed to compete against Apple's M-series silicon and Nvidia's dedicated GPUs in the laptop segment. It may not rival the RTX 4090 laptop GPU, but it could give mid-ranged offerings like the RTX 4070 laptop a run for its money.
Pricing is a valid concern since Strix Point - the Ryzen AI 300 family - is limited in availability and costs a pretty penny if you want the best. Nonetheless, we expect AMD to unveil its Strix Halo lineup of APUs at CES 2025 in addition to Krackan Point and the Radeon RX 8000 series.
