AMD Strix Halo is coming to more mini PCs (eventually)

AMD’s Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” processors are high-performance mobile chips with integrated graphics that can rival recent mid-range discrete GPUs, support for up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, and an NPU that offers up to 50 TOPS of hardware-accelerated AI performance.

So far only a couple of companies have announced PCs that will actually use the chips though. There’s the Asus ROG Flow Z13 gaming tablet and HP ZBook Ultra 14 G1a mobile workstation (laptop). And on the desktop side of things there’s the HP Z2 Mini G1a and Framework Desktop. But soon we could see more small form factor desktop computers with Strix Halo chips.

Earlier this year rumors started making the rounds that Asus was working on an NUC-branded mini PC with support for up to a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip. That’s be kind of weird since Asus inherited the NUC brand from Intel and doesn’t typically use it to describe mini PCs with AMD chips. But it would hardly be out of character for Asus to launch some sort of mini PC with the most powerful AMD mobile chips available. Asus hasn’t confirmed the rumors though.

Now Chinese mini PC maker GMK say it is planning to launch products with Strix Halo chips. What they’ll be called, when they’ll be available, how much they’ll cost, or even what they’ll look like are all still up in the air. So in some ways this isn’t much of an announcement.

But GMK was also one of the first companies to announce plans for a mini PC with an AMD Strix Point processor. And while it wasn’t the first to bring one of those mini PCs to market, the GMK Evo-X1 is a real computer that you can buy now, so I believe it when GMK says it’ll eventually launch Strix Halo models. I also expect that if GMK is planning to bring Strix Halo mini PCs to market, it’s safe to say that other Chinese brands (like GEEKOM, MINISFORUM, ACEMAGIC, and AOOSTAR) will probably follow suit in the coming months. What remains to be seen is how long it will take any of those companies to bring products to market.

For the most part Strix Point and Strix Halo architecture are similar: both feature Zen 5 CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 graphics, and up to a 50 TOPS Ryzen AI NPU. But Strix Halo has a higher TDP and support far more CPU and GPU cores. It also leverages unified memory to allocate up to 96GB of LPDDR5x memory to the GPU with up to 256 GB/sec bandwidth.

While GMK doesn’t explicitly state which Strix Halo processors it will offer, the most exciting is clearly the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which is a 16-core, 32-thread processor with Radeon 8060S integrated graphics featuring 40 compute units. But even a Ryzen AI Max 390 would be a significant upgrade over the Ryzen AI 9 370 HX Strix Point chip, which is designed to consume less power and has far less graphics power.

via VideoCardz