A new leak has revealed the specs and design of AMD’s Zen 5-based Strix Halo processors. These upcoming beasts are said to house a massive iGPU capable of dwarfing even existing APUs.
According to a leak on ChipHell forums, AMD’s Strix Halo CPUs will feature two CCDs each packing eight Zen 5 cores clocking up to 5GHz, 8MB of L2 cache, and 32MB of L3 Cache. Each CCD measures around 80mm², manufactured using TSMC’s N4X node.
The CCDs and SOC chiplets are expected to be connected using an Infinity Link – like current RX 7900 XTX – or using TSMC’s CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) multi-chip packaging technology.
While previously Team Read has opted for smaller GPUs, since most laptop manufacturers would add a dedicated GPU anyway, this time things will be different. If these leaked specs are to be believed, the Strix Halo chips will pack up to 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units clocked at 3GHz. This means a total of 2,560 stream processors, 80 AI accelerators, and 40 Ray accelerators. It seems that Apple’s M-series’ massive iGPUs have pushed AMD to react.
Both the CPU and iGPU will share the same memory pool, comprised of either four or eight LPDDR5X memory chips. These are linked to the CPU via a wide 256-bit bus (8×32-bit or 4×64-bit) and 32MB of cache which should allow for some 500GB/s of bandwidth when using LPDD5X-8533 chips. But that’s not all. As AI is all the rage these days, AMD slaps an NPU inside this 200mm² SOC.
Interestingly, this processor doesn’t carry much in term of PCIe lanes, maxing out at x4 PCIe Gen 5. However, this may not be an issue since a dedicated GPU won’t be needed. Regarding performance, some shared graphics claim that the 16-core/40-CU Strix Halo CPU is 28% faster than a Ryzen 9 7945HX in multi-threaded Cinebench R23 and equivalent to an RTX 4070M in 3DMark Time Spy. Quite the claim.
These chips will target mainstream gaming laptops or premium ultra-portable segments, potentially mini-PCs too. Gaming ultrabooks, anyone? As usual, these are not official specs, so take them with a grain of salt. That said, we would like them to be true.