AMD's Strix Halo APU Spotted In First Benchmark Leak With A 5.36Ghz Clock
The Strix Halo CPUs were first leaked over two years ago, but many people (including your author) doubted the authenticity of that leak given the peculiarities of the processors. A mobile part with sixteen CPU cores, an integrated GPU the size of a Radeon RX 6750 XT, and a double-wide memory bus to feed it? What in the world is this thing? Well, it's the perfect competitor to Apple's Mx series of SoCs, is what it is.
Successive leaks have confirmed that Strix Halo is indeed real, but now we have the very first benchmark leaks that seem to be from such a chip. We're basing that on the OPN (which has never appeared before) and the CPUID, which enthusiast and leak-watcher HXL identified specifically as Strix Halo.
The specifications in the Geekbench leaks do match up with some expected SKUs for Strix Halo. While the top-end configuration has been rumored for 16 CPU cores, there will obviously be lower-end models of the part. Given that Strix Halo is said to use the same core complex dice (CCDs) as the "Granite Ridge" desktop CPUs, a model with only a single CCD—giving it eight Zen 5 CPU cores and 32MB of L3 cache—makes perfect sense.
As far as the actual benchmark scores go, we don't want to put too much stock into them considering that this is two steps removed from final hardware, but a single-core score of 2177 points and a multi-core score of 13993 points are both excellent results for an eight-core mobile part. Keeping in mind that this is Geekbench 5, not Geekbench 6, the single-core score would be the highest we've ever seen for a laptop part, while the multi-core score puts it in the same range as a Core i9-12900HK, a Core Ultra 9 165H, Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, and well ahead of AMD's Hawk Point processors.
Geekbench records a "base frequency" of 5.36 GHz, which looks a lot like a boost clock to us. That's quite high for a mobile part; it's an extra 360 MHz on top of the 5.1 GHz that AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 will hit. Given that this is an engineering sample, it's possible we could see clocks as high as 5.4-5.5 GHz from these mobile parts, which is extremely impressive. It also makes us hope that Strix Halo finds its way to desktops where it can be served a practically unlimited power and thermal budget.
Thanks to HXL (@9550pro) for the confirmation.
