Certainly one of AMD’s incoming Strix Halo chips has been noticed in a benchmark for the primary time, and that is the flagship APU in reality, indicating that as rumors recommend, these Ryzen laptop computer processors are nearing launch.

VideoCardz observed the Geekbench end result for a 16-core (Zen 5) Strix Halo chip with Radeon 8060S built-in graphics.

The APU – which is AMD’s fancy identify for an all-in-one processor with an built-in GPU and NPU – is known as the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Professional 395, and is proven as boosting as much as 5.1GHz.

As for the precise benchmark end result, the check run is Vulkan efficiency, which apparently is a graphics metric. Nonetheless, the rating of 67,004 is slower than anticipated – however there’s a cause for that, which I’ll focus on subsequent.

Evaluation: GPU efficiency and workstation-only worries

That’s a comparatively disappointing rating, as a result of as VideoCardz factors out, the RX 7600 desktop graphics card hits about 90,000 in that check. The hope is that the Radeon 8060S built-in GPU within the Strix Halo flagship will be capable of get quite a bit nearer to the RX 7600 than this, based mostly on prerelease hype – which has in contrast it to an Nvidia RTX 4070 discrete cellular GPU up to now – and it would effectively do, in the long run.

Keep in mind, that is nonetheless an early pattern chip, so the completed Ryzen AI Max+ Professional 395 will undoubtedly run sooner. It’s too quickly to make judgments, particularly based mostly on only a single leak (from Geekbench – which is hardly the primary choose for graphics benchmarks, in fact).

This leak is extra about the truth that the Strix Halo flagship is floating round being examined, quite than the precise end result itself. It’s one other hefty trace that the rumors of AMD launching the brand new vary of APUs at CES 2025 are right.

Nonetheless, maybe everybody ought to mood their expectations just a little in some respects. Sure, the Strix Halo flagship’s Radeon GPU has 40 CUs and relies on a refreshed take of RDNA 3 (dubbed RDNA 3.5) – in comparison with 32 CUs and vanilla RDNA 3 within the RX 7600 – however the latter remains to be a discrete desktop GPU, and built-in options are clearly extra restricted by way of design and thermals.

We are going to simply need to see how efficiency shakes out in relation to critiques, in fact, or certainly additional leaks. What I’m betting we will all agree on, most certainly, is that identify, which appears very clunky – but it surely additionally carries one other worrying trace.

The ‘Professional’ within the identify (Ryzen AI Max+ Professional 395) signifies that this can be a workstation half. Now, there may very well be a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (non-Professional) counterpart for thin-and-light gaming laptops that include the identical CPU and GPU configuration – or, as earlier chatter on the grapevine has instructed, AMD may reserve this flagship APU for workstations solely.

Gaming notebooks might solely get a lesser Ryzen AI Max+ chip, and this can be a trace that that is the case, albeit an admittedly skinny one. Once more, all we will do is hold watching the leaks, however we’ll probably discover out at CES 2025 with that massive Strix Halo reveal: will it’s workstation-only, or not, for the flagship?

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