AMD Medusa Halo With Up To 24 Cores May Use LPDDR6 For Huge Bandwidth Gains
That's a little more notable than you might think. LPDDR6 is a significant shift from LPDDR5/X. Besides bringing higher transfer rates—up to 14.4 Gbps—it also operates with a 50% wider bus, moving 24 bits at a time versus the 16-bit channel width of LPDDR5X. Devices (that means DRAM packages in this context) that combine multiple ICs will have 48 or 96-bit interfaces. That means that machines using LPDDR6 memory will have funky power-of-three memory channel widths.
What does that mean for the performance of Medusa Halo, then? Well, it's promising. Despite the use of a double-wide 256-bit memory bus, memory bandwidth remains the Achilles' heel of both gaming and AI performance on extant Ryzen AI Max parts. LPDDR5 just isn't fast enough; 256 GB/second sounds incredible, but it's piddly compared to even mid-range discrete GPUs. If we assume Medusa Halo machines use the same number of LPDDR6 devices as they did LPDDR5, we're looking at nearly double the memory bandwidth: around 512 GB/second for entry-level LPDDR6, or as much as 691 GB/second if AMD reaches for the top 14.4 Gbps speed.
To put those numbers in context, 512 GB/second is the same amount of memory bandwidth available on the Radeon RX 6900 XT, and very close to the 576 GB/second of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE. Meanwhile, 691 GB/second would put Medusa Halo in the same ballpark as the GeForce RTX 4080, or actually ahead of the Radeon RX 9070 XT. It won't likely have the GPU horsepower of either of those cards, and the memory bus has to be shared with the CPU cores, but it's still an incredible leap forward.
Speaking of the CPU cores, Medusa Halo is obviously going to use Zen 6. The "24 cores" number has been leaked, but it's basically a reasonable assumption given that Strix Halo uses a pair of Core Complex Dies, or CCDs. Zen 6-based Ryzen and EPYC processors are said to use twelve-core CCDs, so it follows that a Medusa Halo chip with two CCDs would have 24 cores. Everything we've heard about Zen 6 suggests that the platform is getting more changes than the CPU cores themselves, but we're sure AMD has some spice in store for those too.
Today's rumor comes to us, as so many do, from Gray (@Olrak29_ on Xwitter), who was actually posting about Samsung's upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips, which will also reportedly use LPDDR6. One thing that's for sure, though, is that the Ryzen AI Max 500 family (or whatever Medusa Halo ends up being called) is going to be expensive. Devices based on the extant Ryzen AI Max chips start at around $1500, which is a pretty penny to pay for that level of performance. We can only imagine that Medusa Halo, with its increased core count, bleeding-edge interconnects, and even higher performance, will be even more costly when it launches next year.
