AMD Ryzen Strix Halo APU With 128GB Of Memory Breaks Cover

AMD's upcoming Ryzen AI 300 series processors based on its 'Strix Point' design are pretty cool, but they're essentially an iteration on its previous-gen Phoenix parts. The really exciting new chip supposedly still on the way from AMD is 'Strix Halo', a monster microprocessor meant for luxurious laptops and mighty mini-PCs. It purportedly packs 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units into a package with 256-bit memory—a first for a consumer CPU.

AMD still hasn't officially confirmed the existence of Strix Halo, but that's okay, because leaks certainly have. The latest information comes to us by way of regular leaker Everest (known as @Olrak29_ on Xwitter) who spotted some interesting entries in some NBD shipping manifests—rapidly becoming a regular source of pre-release information.


The specific entries found by Everest are the ones above and the ones below. The ones above are the most interesting; they are for test boards sporting "FP11" sockets known as "Maple Rev.B". We can reasonably assume that these must be for Strix Halo considering the rated 120W power and the massive amounts of onboard memory: 32GB, 64GB, and a whopping 128GB of shared LPDDR5X SDRAM.

Indeed, Strix Halo is expected to use soldered-on LPDDR5X memory running at up to 8533 MT/s, and that's why these test boards include specific memory capacities. As for why so much, it's because of that double-wide 256-bit memory interface, and the fact that it's shared between CPUs and GPU. Such a memory bus is mandatory to support the massive 40-CU GPU; going purely off specs, that graphics part could offer better graphics performance than a Radeon RX 6750 XT—absolutely incredible for an integrated GPU.


The other shipping manifest entry seems to be for 'Strix Point' Ryzen AI processors just like the already-announced Ryzen AI 9 family, except that these are "PRO" models meant for OEMs to build business PCs around. The curious part of this snippet is that it includes "Ryzen AI 7" CPUs; AMD hasn't announced any Strix Point processors in any tier below "9", so this serves as confirmation that those parts are coming—not that we really ever doubted that.


Assuming the rumors are even slightly accurate, 'Strix Halo' is set to be an absolute monster of a processor. Leakers have said that the cIOD will be more similar to the central "GCD" of a Radeon GPU than previous Ryzen I/O dice, while the dual eight-core Zen 5 CCDs will be the same ones used for desktop Ryzen and EPYC processors. That means a full 32MB of L3 cache for each CCD rather than the 16MB available on Strix Point.

All told, this part is more like a console chip than a laptop CPU, and it's difficult to imagine such a big chip being limited to laptops. Hopefully we hear something official from AMD about them soon.