Rumors about AMD Strix Halo APUs first started doing the rounds back in early 2023, and today the new APU lineup is finally official led by the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395.
AMD is offering a total of four SKUs under Strix Halo. The flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and its Pro variant features 16 cores, 32 threads, up to 5.1 GHz boost, 80 MB cache, and 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units (CUs). Following this are the Ryzen AI Max/Pro 390 with 12/24T and the Ryzen AI Max/Pro 385 featuring 8C/16T. Both the Ryzen AI Max 390 and Ryzen AI 385 are equipped with 32 CU RDNA 3.5 iGPUs.
The entry SKU — the Ryzen AI Max Pro 380 with 6 cores, 12 threads, 4.9 GHz boost, 22 MB cache, and 16 RDNA 3.5 CUs — is not available in a non-Pro variant and is likely designed for businesses that could benefit from AI smarts but aren't chasing performance charts.
All Ryzen AI Max Strix Halo APUs are also equipped with a 50 TOPS XDNA 2 NPU, up to 256 GB/s memory bandwidth, and are configurable with a TDP between 45 and 120 W.
AMD is going after the M4 MacBook Pro with Strix Halo. The company showed off significantly faster Blender, V-Ray, and Corona rendering with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 compared to the Apple M4 Pro 12-core and M4 Pro 14-core SoCs.
The company also claims 2.6x faster 3D rendering and 1.4x faster graphics performance with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 over the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V.
The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is slated to be the first Copilot+ PC processor to run a 70 billion LLM locally. Not just that, AMD is also going all out to claim that the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is 2.2x faster AI performance than the 450 W GeForce RTX 4090 desktop at an 87% lower TDP than Nvidia's current monster consumer GPU.
Laptops powered by the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 are expected to be available from Q1-Q2 2025.
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AMD CES 2025 press brief