AMD “Strix Halo” Super APU Chip Details Leaked: Apple M3’s Biggest Competition?

Aside from the regular Zen5-based Ryzen processors that are widely expected to first be showcased in the upcoming Computex event, AMD is also preparing a secret chip in the form of “Strix Halo” – a supersized APU chip that combines 16 Zen5 cores, 40 RDNA3.5 CUs, and super-fast memory to form what could be the most powerful laptop chip we’ve seen.

According to the user “Singaporean Demon King” (新加坡妖王) on the Chiphell forums, who compiled all the rumors and leaks thus far relating to this processor. As pictured in the diagram, the Strix Halo will feature two 8-core Zen5 CCDs (core complex dies), forming a 16-core CPU; next to them is a SoC die (often referred to as I/O die in AMD’s contexts) that houses the 40 CU RDNA3.5 GPU. Given its multi-chiplet design, AMD uses two slightly different process nodes for both types of silicon – TSMC N4X for the CCDs, and TSMC N4P for the IOD (SoC die).

However, one thing we haven’t known much information so far is the memory – and the diagram alleges that the Strix Halo chip will use eight DRAM packages forming the 256-bit wide LPDDR5X RAM providing nearly 500GB/s of bandwidth. That’s in the same ballpark as Unified Memory found on Apple M-series SoCs, as well as discrete GPUs that rely on GDDR memory. That aside, other numbers indicate that the chip will use as much as 175W, or as little as 40W.

The forum post also provided a chart showing performance comparisons between Strix Halo in 16C+40CU and 12C+32CU variants, plus competitions from Intel and NVIDIA on their respective domains. Here, we can see the Strix Halo definitively beats one of the fastest Intel laptop CPUs on offer today, the Core i9-14900HX, in both single-core and multi-core workloads.

On the GPU front, the top-end Strix Halo is competitive against NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 Laptop GPU on raster workloads, although Team Green’s ray tracing advantage has given its chips a clear advantage in workloads like Port Royal and Speed Way. The lower-end 12C+32CU Strix Halo, meanwhile, stays on the same raster performance level as the NVIDIA RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.

However, as the forum post title implies, there may be some information that is purely speculative on the leaker’s part. For that matter, Videocardz reported that one of the prominent leakers of the scene, @Olrak29_, has confirmed that some information is correct, while others are not. However, that tweet has since been removed, so verifying the information is difficult.

Pokdepinion: The specs sure looks exciting – but we’ll have to see if it turns out to be real.