Strix Halo: AMD's "giant APU" specs leaked?

Strix Halo will be AMD's fastest combined processor, also known as an APU– and it's not being built exclusively for gaming consoles such as the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, but also compact desktop machines. Rumors are now coming from the Chinese Chiphell forum about Strix Halo's architecture.

Note: We do not know the source "新加坡妖王", but the alleged specs seem realistic. Even if not all the numbers turns out to be correct, Strix Halo is very likely going to look something like this.

Strix Halo is said to consist of three chiplets: two Core Complex Dies (CCDs), each containing eight Zen 5 cores, and one SOC chiplet. With this structure, AMD could adopt the CCDs from the desktop Ryzen 9000, which would have two advantages: the CPU's cores should achieve high clock rates of up to 5.8 GHz and be able to access 64 MB level 3 cache. In its monolithic combination processors, AMD is cutting level 3 cache by half, which costs performance, especially in games.

GPU at graphics card level

In addition to the I/O interfaces and an AI accelerator, a comparatively powerful Radeon graphics unit with RDNA3.5 architecture is to be located in a SOC chiplet. 40 compute units would translate to 2560 shader cores. This would mean the GPU is comparable to a Radeon RX 7600 XT (2048 shaders) rather than a Radeon RX 7700 XT (3456 shaders). However, at up to 3.0 GHz, the Strix Halo GPU should clock significantly higher than both graphics cards.

Unlike previous combined processors, there will be an Infinity cache, in this case consisting of 32 MB SRAM. It would loosen the memory bottleneck, as the supposedly planned LPDDR5X-8533 RAM would only transfer around 273 GB/s at 256 bits.

Among other things, 12 PCI Express lanes are planned for NVMe SSDs, including four PCIe 5.0 lanes. There will be no lanes for a standalone graphics card. According to the overview, Strix Halo is modern in terms of connections: It includes two USB4, Displayport 2.1 (with 40 gbit/s) and HDMI 2.1 (with 48 gbit/s). It should be possible to connect four high-resolution displays at the same time.

Chip manufacturer TSMC is said to produce the chiplets with improved processors from the 5-nanometer class – N4X and N4P. Previous rumors pointed to a launch in early 2025, before which the Strix Point notebook processor with 12 CPU cores and a smaller GPU would be released.

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