AMD’s Strix Point Halo chips have been the subject of a major leak underlining the potential power of these processors, and when they’re expected to arrive – which isn’t in the near future for gaming laptops, sadly.
Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID) on YouTube had the scoop on these Strix Halo APUs, and as per an apparently official render leaked from AMD showing a chip, the processors will be called the Ryzen AI Max Pro series. (A bit of ‘kitchen sink’ style naming there, with an element of one-upmanship in terms of the models seen in Apple’s M series silicon, no doubt).
We’re given spec details too, which mirror what we’ve heard from the rumor mill previously – namely that the flagship Strix Halo CPU will have 16 cores, and the integrated graphics will be RDNA 3.5 (refreshed RDNA 3) with a mighty 40 CUs.
This means that the flagship chip will be around the same level of power as a discrete RTX 4070 laptop GPU, at the least, so the integrated graphics might even outdo the RTX 4070. Let that sink in for a moment – remember, this is integrated graphics. We’re also apparently looking at a TDP of 120W.
We can expect to see Strix Halo launched at CES 2025 – as already rumored, and AMD will seemingly have a pile of stuff to reveal at the show – and workstation laptops with Ryzen AI Max Pro chips are going to be first on the shelves in Q1 of 2025.
After that, gaming laptops will arrive with Strix Halo in the second quarter, although we may see a smattering of those notebooks in Q1. MLID sounds pretty sure that most of the gaming launches will be in Q2, however, with creators and other heavyweight users being targeted for the initial silicon here. This makes sense in terms of poaching MacBook sales with these ‘Max Pro’ processors, of course.
A third outlet for Strix Halo might eventually be APUs produced for small form-factor PCs, depending on how successful the chips are in laptops (and we guess how much resources Team Red has behind them, too).
Analysis: Concerns about gaming laptops
These Strix Halo processors are set to be nothing less than a revelation for thin-and-light gaming laptops (and of course, workstations as mentioned – which will be the priority for AMD, perhaps to the annoyance of gamers, but there are plentiful profits to be had in the world of svelte MacBook-style laptops for creatives and other power users).
As MLID points out, though, the slight snag is that by the time Ryzen AI Max Pro notebooks pitch up, we will likely have a range of new laptop GPUs from Nvidia. With next-gen Blackwell GPUs rumored to be a considerable step up in power – we may see these at CES 2025 too – the comparison between Strix Halo’s integrated graphics and discrete laptop video cards isn’t going to be quite as striking.
Of course, this means at Strix Halo launch time, we’ll likely be looking at the equal of the RTX 5060 mobile, rather than the RTX 4070 as mentioned in the comparison drawn by the leak – and that doesn’t sound quite as eye-opening. However, remember that the sort of laptops Strix Halo can be packed into will not play host to a discrete Nvidia GPU and related cooling, which will require a bigger chassis.
In short, these are still some heavyweight APUs to look forward to that are going to pack quite a punch for more compact notebooks. If anything, the worry for us might be that workstations are favored over gaming laptops to more of a degree than we’d ideally like – we shall see. It’s possible that more modest variants of the Strix Halo CPUs will be the engines of gaming laptops, and as VideoCardz, which spotted the leak, also points out, most of the spillage (benchmarks) around Ryzen AI Max Pro thus far has related to workstations.
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