AMD’s beastly ‘Strix Halo’ Ryzen AI Max+ debuts with radical new memory tech to feed RDNA 3.5 graphics and Zen 5 CPU cores
AMD announced its ‘Strix Halo’ Ryzen AI Max series laptop processors here at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, and by any definition, the new APUs look to be absolute monsters for the enthusiast thin-and-light gaming and AI workstation laptop markets, featuring what AMD bills as the fastest integrated graphics available in the Windows ecosystem courtesy of a new disruptive integrated memory architecture that unlocks new capabilities. In fact, AMD says the AI Max chips deliver up to 1.4X faster gaming performance than Intel’s flagship ‘Lunar Lake’ Core Ultra 9 288V flagship, and up to 84% faster rendering performance than the Apple MacBook M4 Pro. AMD also says the chip can deliver up to an incredible 2.2X more performance in AI workloads than the discreet desktop Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU, but at an 87% lower TDP.
The fire-breathing 120W Zen 5-powered flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 comes packing 16 CPU cores and 32 threads paired with 40 RDNA 3.5 (Radeon 8060S) integrated graphics cores (CUs), but perhaps more importantly, it supports up to 128GB of memory that is shared among the CPU, GPU, and XDNA 2 NPU AI engines. The memory can also be carved up to a distinct pool dedicated to the GPU only, thus delivering an astounding 256 GB/s of memory throughput that unlocks incredible performance in memory capacity-constrained AI workloads (details below). AMD says this delivers groundbreaking capabilities for thin-and-light laptops and mini workstations, particularly in AI workloads. The company also shared plenty of gaming and content creation benchmarks.
