You never know what surprise hardware will show up on Geekbench. This time, it’s a Ryzen AI Max 300 series APU known by the codename Strix Halo. We’ve been hearing bits here and there about a high-end platform for high-performance laptops and possibly workstations. The new chips, which include both CPU and GPU cores, are likely to compete with Apple’s M series and other competing hardware. AMD is expected to formally unveil the new APU line at CES, less than a month away.
AMD’s penchant for long product names is evident in its latest offering, which (according to the Geekbench entry) is an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395. The name field also notes that the GPU portion of this CPU/GPU set is the AMD Radeon 8060S. The CPU has a clock speed of 3.0GHz and 16 cores. The motherboard is listed as an AMD Maple-STXH and is holding 64GB of DDR5 RAM on four channels (quad channel).
This appears to be an early-ish version of the product, given its tepid benchmark scores, and isn’t indicative of the final hardware. The overall Vulkan score for the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 test bench is 67004, which isn’t a match yet for modern hardware. The memory transfer rate was just 1994 MT/s. As we said, the score isn’t particularly useful at this stage of the game.
Geekbench Strix Halo
Credit: Geekbench
If AMD makes a demo system available at CES, it will be interesting to see what the system scores. Given the performance of this early version, we think AMD will want to show users what it’s really capable of in January. For cache, the APU has 64MB of L3 cache, 16MB of L2 cache, and 16MB each of L1 instruction and data cache.
So far, it looks like the rumors about the Strix Halo line are largely true, and Strix Halo really might be able to take on Apple’s Max series chips. With up to 40 compute units, they should have the hardware for it. But now AMD has to optimize that hardware and get it up to speed. That challenge isn’t the only one: as Tom’s Hardware points out, we don’t know how yet how AMD will handle pricing for what could be costly hardware.
The motherboard likely has the FP11 socket, which is going to be much bigger than previous mobile sockets. The Dragon Range CPUs, for example, which are for desktop-replacement laptops, have smaller sockets than the new Strix Halo requires.