AMD’s Strix Halo Zen 5 APU tested in Geekbench AI benchmark — Ryzen AI Max 390 sample falls behind Ryzen 7 7840HS

One of AMD’s Ryzen AI Max 300 (Strix Halo) APU has gone through Geekbench AI, the AI-focused counterpart to Geekbench 6. Discovered by Everest on X, the Ryzen AI Max 390 (AMD Eng Sample: 100-000001421-50_Y) was tested, but only on the Zen 5 CPU cores, not the GPU or NPU.

As always, take the Geekbench result with a pinch of salt since we don’t know the state of the silicon. According to the submission, the Ryzen AI Max 390 is inside HP’s ZBook Ultra 14-inch G1a, which appears to be a mobile workstation device, so the cooling should be adequate.

Using all 12 CPU cores, the Ryzen AI Max 390 outputted a single precision score of 4,733 points, a half-precision score of 4,944 points, and a quantized score of 13,944 points. Testing was accomplished on Geekbench AI 1.1.0 using the OpenVINO framework.

Since the benchmark was relegated entirely to the CPU cores, AI performance was not as good as what the chip would be able to do on the GPU or NPU. For example, the chip’s quantized score was inferior to that of Intel’s entry-level Arc A310 graphics card, which outputted a score of 15,453 points. It was also worse than some Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake integrated graphics chips, with an even higher score. A similar story also goes for the single-precision and half-precision scores.

The Strix Halo chip failed to impress when looking specifically at CPU scores in an apples-to-apples comparison. Out of the relatively few OpenVINO CPU scores I was able to find, the Ryzen AI Max chip outperformed AMD’s previous generation eight-core Ryzen 7 7840HS Zen 4 mobile CPU, which outputted a single precision score of 5,099 points, a half-precision score of 5,118 points, and a quantized score of 14,680 points.

I also took the liberty of testing my personal Ryzen 7 5800X3D to provide a desktop reference. It also outperformed the Strix Halo APU (for the most part). The 5800X3D featured a single precision score of 5,428 points, a half-precision score of 5,522 points, and a quantized score of 8,115 points. The quantized results were the only area where the Strix Halo chip was at an advantage.

From what I could find, the only chips that the Ryzen AI Max 390 can consistently outperform are Intel’s Meteor Lake notebook chips, such as the Core Ultra 7 165H. Two listings revealed single-precision and half-precision scores below 3000 points and quantized scores below 7200 for this CPU model.

Looking at CPU-only results for AI performance is not as useless as it might seem. When AI workloads can tax the entire chip (CPU, NPU, and GPU), having capable AI performance on the CPU can be beneficial. Regardless, we are disappointed the benchmarker did not test the NPU and monster-integrated GPU inside the Strix Halo chip, which is far more critical for AI-focused workloads.

The Ryzen AI Max 300 series, aka Strix Halo, is an upcoming APU lineup focused on high-performance computing for mobile devices. Strix Halo is slated to arrive in early 2025.