AMD Strix Halo refresh leaks online with massive memory upgrade

An earlier leak hinted at an imminent refresh of AMD’s powerful Strix Halo laptop chips. Like their Strix Point counterparts, Gorgon Halo is slated to offer minimal improvements over its last-gen counterprat, with the real upgrades reserved for the Zen 6-based Medusa Halo lineup. A top-spec Gorgon Halo CPU, the Ryzen AI Max+ 495 Pro, has now shown up online.

It scores 57,525 in PassMark’s overall benchmark, making it marginally faster than its Strix Halo-based counterpart (Ryzen AI Max+ 395 Pro), which averages at 51,778. The gains are a lot less impressive when pitted against the regular Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (55,193 average). Then again, this is to be expected because the Gorgon Halo part offers practically nothing in the way of raw specs. 

Gorgon Point’s largest upgrade, however, comes in the form of memory with support for up to 192 GB of RAM. In contrast, Strix Halo maxed out at 128 GB, so a jump to 192 GB is slated to be an incentive to upgrade. Interesting choice to make in the middle of a memory crisis. Unfortunately, the listing doesn’t specify what type of memory is used, but LPDDR5X seems like a plausible candidate. The faster LPDDR6 spec is almost certainly reserved for Medusa Halo.

The Ryzen AI Max+ 495 Pro comes with 16 CPU cores, which are likely based on the Zen 5 architecture and 32 threads. For the iGPU, it uses a Radeon 8065S. The increment from 8060 on the original Strix Halo part to 8065 implies subtle changes, but the base architecture is still likely RDNA 3.5. The performance bump between the two isn’t much to write home about, either, with the iGPU scoring 18,427 points in PassMark’s GPU benchmark (vs. 18,176 for the Radeon 8060S).