New AMD Zen 6 leak reveals Medusa Point for laptops alongside possible AM5 Medusa Halo APUs

AMD is rumored to follow Zen 5 CPU architecture with Zen 6 in 2026. Back in February, a leak from Everest on X revealed that the Zen 6 architecture, codenamed “Medusa”, will bring some big changes including RDNA 5 graphics to the APUs. Adding to these reports, Moore’s Law Is Dead claimed in April that Zen 6 will have three variants, the “Standard” desktop chips, the “Dense Classic” Zen 6c, and the new “Client Dense” with even more cores than the Zen 6c.

Moore’s Law Is Dead has now alleged some more details about the AMD Zen 6 Medusa architecture.

For starters, one of the leaker’s AMD sources claimed to MLID that the company will tapeout Medusa, which is “a Zen 6 product”, by Q2 2025 with production following in late 2025. However, there is a chance that production could move to 2026. A different source confirmed Medusa to be a Zen 6 product and suggested that it could be a “family that launches to laptop” in addition to the desktop AM5 platform. The same source also mentioned hearing that Strix Halo based on the Zen 5 architecture and “Medusa Halo” both use TSMC N3E for IODs and the APUs could come to desktops.

AMD announced the Strix Point APUs with Zen 5 CPUs and RDNA 3.5 iGPUs for notebooks at Computex 2024. However, Strix Halo, which is said to be the flagship AMD APU capable of rivaling desktop GPUs in graphical performance, is still under wraps. One of the possible reasons why AMD is yet to acknowledge Strix Halo could be the delay associated with the N3E IOD.

To that end, an AMD source revealed to MLID that Strix Point launching 2 quarters late has to do with the fact that the company wanted Strix Point APUs to have a chiplet architecture based on the 3 nm process. But the chiplet design was reportedly canceled because AMD apparently ran into issues and “TSMC 3 nm got delayed”.

So now that Strix Point Ryzen AI 300 APUs are launching without any chiplets and Strix Halo is nowhere on the horizon, the source postulated that the Strix Halo delay couldn’t simply be “from chiplet issues”.  In other words, Strix Halo could both be chiplet based and utilize 3 nm IODs.

Finally, take the information presented here with a giant grain of salt as it will be quite a while since we start hearing anything official regarding Zen 6. In the meantime, we have Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 as well as Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point APUs to look forward to, both of which are quite exciting.

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