AMD's Chiplet APU: An Overview of Strix Halo
2 days ago
- #Strix-Halo
- #APU
- #AMD
- AMD's Strix Halo is a high-performance APU designed for mobile use, with a TDP range of 55W to 120W.
- It features dual 8-core Zen 5 CCDs (16 cores total) with 512b FPU, similar to desktop parts, and a boost clock of 5.1GHz.
- The APU includes a powerful RDNA 3.5 iGPU with 40 compute units, 32MB Infinity Cache, and up to 2.9GHz boost clock.
- Strix Halo uses a 256b LPDDR5X-8000 memory bus, providing up to 256GB/s bandwidth, higher than most APUs but slightly less than dedicated GPUs like the RX 7600 XT.
- CPU performance is competitive with desktop Zen 5 CPUs, matching the 7950X in integer performance and coming close to the 9950X in floating point.
- GPU performance is impressive, rivaling mid-range dedicated GPUs like the RTX 5070 Mobile in some workloads, especially in gaming and compute-heavy tasks.
- Memory latency is low for a mobile part (~123ns), though desktop CPUs like the 9950X still perform better (~75-80ns).
- Strix Halo's Infinity Cache provides higher bandwidth and lower latency compared to competing GPUs like the 5070M.
- The APU excels in gaming, with the Radeon 8060S iGPU outperforming the 5070M in some scenarios, especially at lower power limits.
- ROCm 7.0.2 support for Strix Halo was delayed, so ML performance will be covered in a future article.
- AMD's chiplet-based APU design opens possibilities for even larger APUs in the future, potentially with wider memory buses.