As you now know, Zen 5 will give rise to several Ryzen variants. One variant is still a bit of a mystery: it’s called Strix Halo, and many are talking about the arrival of Ultimate APUs . Over the last few days, several news items, leaks and rumors (often mixed together) have been published on the Chiphell forums. What makes these forums so difficult to read is that they mix well-documented leaks and credible data with rumors and speculation turned into news. So why is the Strix version of Halo such a hot topic? Quite simply because the most accurate and serious leaks speak of an out-of-the-ordinary APU, at odds with AMD’s track record to date. AMD is said to be offering up to 16 Zen 5 cores for the Strix Halo, but it’s the GPU that’s really getting people excited. In its highest version, it is said to feature 40 RDNA 3 computing units (i.e. 2,560 stream processors, 80 AI gas pedals, 40 Ray tracing gas pedals). If we take a step back, the Radeon 780M in today’s Ryzen mobiles is limited to 12 CPUs. This configuration theoretically gives it graphics power equivalent to an Nvidia RTX 4070M.
Ultimate APU STRIX HALO: for what?
The orgy continues as we hear of an NPU capable of delivering 45-50 TOPS ( XDNA 2 architecture), a maximum CPU frequency of around 5.8 GHz, a GPU frequency of 3 GHz… All this for a Max TDP of 175W, which is obviously enormous for an APU. If this figure were to be confirmed, we would indeed be close to the max TDP of a “mobile” RTX 4090…And this is where we get to the fantasy with benchmarks that are really just theoretical “projections” of results and at no point any kind of leak or information.
As you can imagine, the fantasy is to imagine an APU solution capable of beating the big Apple Silicon SoCs that equip the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. However, for the former, we’re a long way from the theoretical TDP envisaged for AMD’s future Ultimate APU. Nevertheless, we can also envisage a solution made available to manufacturers, offering an adjustable TDP depending on the chassis/form factor . In short, there are still far too many uncertainties (in fact, there are no certainties at all) about this APU, due to arrive in 2025. By then, Apple will have delivered its M3 Max / Ultra SoC, Intel its Lunar Lake…
