New features surrounding the Strix Halo APU have been highlighted in a new leak today, including its implementation in one of ASUS’s most powerful upcoming ROG Flow laptops.
Speculations about AMD’s Strix Halo APUs have been doing the rounds for a while now. And while we don’t have a complete picture yet, it is largely believed that the APUs will be released sometime next year.
As far as technical specifications are concerned, there have been a few leaks that talk about what to expect from the APUs – however, nothing has been confirmed officially by AMD.
Now, as per a new leak, the Strix Halo APUs look set to feature two Zen 5 CCDs and an RDNA 3.5 graphics card, which will allow developers to design devices that should run games and applications without relying on a discrete GPU.
The Strix Halo APU will have RDNA 3.5 graphics
According to an earlier leak, the Strix Point APUs will feature a smaller FP8 package, and the Strix Halo APUs will use a larger FP11 package. To be more specific, the FP11 package measures a significant 37.5 x 45mm, which is equal to an area of 1687mm².
However, when looking at the new leak, which are blog posts by thermal engineer and specialist, Sam Jiun-Wei Hu, even though the package is bigger, the actual APU may not be that huge. The processor features three dies – a larger 307mm² for the graphics and two 66.3mm² dies for the Zen 5 CCDs. This brings the whole chip dimensions to 24.04mm x 19.78mm or 475.31mm².
The space for two Zen5 CCDs means that the APU can accommodate two 8-core and 16-thread chips, which totals up to 16 cores and 32 threads. Again, this was suggested in the earlier leak we mentioned.
Further, in the same leak by Sam Jiun-Wei Hu, it looks like the graphics card that will go into the APU seems to be on par with the RTX 4070 Laptop GPU. The AMD RDNA 3.5 iGPU is being compared to an Intel Raptor Lake (GN21) chip, which is a premium mobile discrete GPU.
From the leaks we have seen, the APUs will be available in three power configurations: 55W, 85W, and a high-performance 120W model. To support demanding workloads, they can be paired with up to 128GB of either SO-DIMM or LPDDR5X memory, running at speeds of up to 8533 MT/s on a 256-bit bus.
AMD seems to be ramping up its APU offerings. With these features, users should be able to play games at good resolutions and high framerates without needing a discrete GPU. In any case, we won’t be seeing these APUs until 2025.
