AMD pushes Ryzen to the Max — Ryzen AI Max 300 Strix Halo reportedly has up to 16 Zen 5 cores and 40 RDNA 3+ CUs

Golden Pig Upgrade Pack, a well-known leaker, has published preliminary details about the potential configurations of AMD’s Ryzen AI Max 300 (codenamed Strix Halo) processors, which are expected to be released in early 2025. In addition, the leaker revealed the official name of these CPUs with an ultra-high-end integrated Radeon GPU.

AMD’s Ryzen AI Max ‘Strix Halo’ processors are aimed at high-performance laptops for gamers and creators. These CPUs will feature a multi-chiplet design comprising of one or two Zen 5 CCDs (for up to 16 Zen 5 cores) and a massive companion chiplet containing a high-end GPU (with up to 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units), a memory controller with a 256-bit LPDDR5X-8533 physical interface (up to 273 GB/s of peak bandwidth), and I/O capabilities.

256-bit LPDDR5X interface will ensure that the performance of their high-end GPU is not limited by memory bandwidth. In addition, the CPU will allocate up to 96 GB of memory for the GPU, which will be handy for AI applications if someone decides to run memory-demanding AI workloads in an integrated GPU.

Right now, AMD is reportedly considering three Ryzen AI Max SKUs:

• Ryzen AI Max+ 395: 16 Zen 5 cores and an RDNA 3.5-based GPU with 2560 stream processors.
• Ryzen AI Max 390: 12 Zen 5 cores and an RDNA 3.5-based GPU with 2560 stream processors.
• Ryzen AI Max 385: 8 Zen 5 cores and an RDNA 3.5-based GPU with 2048 stream processors.

It is unclear whether AMD will settle for three SKUs for its Ryzen AI Max. On the one hand, Strix Halo is an enthusiast-grade product, so severely cutting GPU performance will destroy the purpose of an APU with a massive built-in GPU designed for gamers. Also, keeping in mind that there are not so many desktop replacement laptops, it is unlikely that there will be too many Ryzen AI Max models.

On the other hand, if AMD has enough companion chiplets with GPUs that have, say, 24 functional compute units (1536 stream processors), it will still offer a massive performance advantage over ‘regular’ Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which has 12 general-purpose cores (four Zen 5 cores, eight Zen 5c cores), the Radeon 890M GPU with 16 compute units (1024 stream processors), and a 128-bit memory interface.

While AMD’s Ryzen AI Max processors will offer desktop-class performance in notebook form factors in terms of general-purpose computing and graphics, they will come at the cost of monstrous power consumption of 120W—133W.