AMD Ryzen AI Max 390 Strix Halo CPU Spotted Shredding AI Benchmarks

AMD's introducing a whole new class of products with the Strix Halo SoCs. These processors integrate CPU, GPU, and NPU into one package, and that's not novel. What is novel, at least in the x86 world, is the amount of each component included in the part. A full 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, a massive 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, and a double-wide memory controller with eight 32-bit DDR5 memory channels, all packed into a single multi-chip package.

What are the use cases for such a processor? It's easy to imagine some: game console, small-form-factor compute server, or mobile workstation. In fact, it looks like HP will be selling one of the latter with a Strix Halo processor in its "ZBook" lineup, apparently known as the "HP ZBook Ultra G1a". We say that because someone at HP leaked the existence of such a machine through the Geekbench AI database.

The processor in question is the AMD Eng Sample 100-000001421-50_Y, which is a Ryzen AI Max 390 according to Golden Pig Upgrade's leak from Friday. It's a twelve-core chip with a base frequency of 3.2 GHz and an apparent boost clock of 5 GHz, at least for the engineering sample version.

We wonder about cooling for the part, though, as the actual scores submitted to the database are around one-third those of a Ryzen 9 9900X. Now, the Ryzen 9 9900X is of course a desktop CPU with higher clock rates, but we would expect a difference of around 10-15%, not 60% or more.

The apparent difference in performance could be down to any number of things given that this is an engineering sample, but the easy assumption beyond "just ES things" is thermals. Trying to keep twelve full-fat Zen 5 CPUs cool in a 14" laptop doesn't sound easy. It's likely that Strix Halo uses the same CPU chiplets as the regular "Granite Ridge" desktop parts, meaning that these CPUs have the full-width AVX-512 implementation as well as the maximum allotment of CPU cache, unlike standard Ryzen AI CPUs.

We've reviewed a few HP ZBook machines in the past, but none of them have come with anything like Strix Halo on board. We're fascinated to see what laptop vendors do with these monster CPUs, and we also can't wait for companies like Minisforum and Beelink to get their mitts on AMD's mega APU. For now, all we can do is wait.