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AMD's Strix Halo under the hood
- linwangg 2y ago[dead]
- aurareturn 2y agoDuring testing, the RTX 4060m is about 13% faster in 1080p than the AI Max 395+. With Ray Tracing, the RTX 4060m is 35% faster. So it's probably closer to RTX 4050m than an RTX 4070m. Also, the Strix Halo laptop is nearly 3x more expensive than the RTX 4060 laptop. So expect to pay more instead of less. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RycbWuyQHLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RycbWuyQHLY
- NikolaNovak 2y agoThat's the thing. Minipcs with high end igpu seem to be encroaching or more expensive than entry to mid gaming laptops from reputable brands that have discrete gpu, plus screen and battery and keyboard etc :-/ I prefer the NUC/mini pc format, currently running 2 Beelink SER8, but wish the price point / value proposition of high end Minipcs wasn't so much out of line with laptops.
- mort96 2y agoI don't understand the name "Strix". It's a name a GPU and motherboard partner of theirs, Asus, uses (used?) for their products. It's impossible for me to read "AMD Strix" and not think of it as some ASU's GPU with an AMD chip in it, or some motherboard for AMD sockets. Aren't there enough syllables out there to invent a combination which doesn't collide with your own board partners?
- newsclues 2y agoStrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strix_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strix_(mythology) Halo is the code name. AMD Ryzen AI MAX 300 is the product name. This continuing to use the code name.
- mort96 2y agoWell, it's a public enough code name that it surprises me that they just used Asus's name.
- damnitbuilds 2y agoConfused me too. Did AMD not know? Or did AMD know and not care?
- 1una 2y agoAMD makes exclusive deals with ASUS regularly. I guess they're just good friends.
- alecmg 2y agooh great, they are not using a confusing name anymore... wait, now they are using a stupid name!
- bombcar 2y agoSpy X Family! AMD is captured.
- DCKing 2y agoI don't think AMD really uses the name "Strix Halo" to market it to a large audience, it's just an internal codename. Just two other recent internal names are "Hawk Point" and "Dragon Range" internally, where Hawk and Dragon are names that MSI and PowerColor use to market GPUs as as well. Heck, PowerColor even exclusively sells AMD cards under the "Red Dragon" name! AMD's marketing names for especially their mobile chips are just so deliberately confusing that it makes way more sense for press and enthusiasts to keep referring to it by its internal code name than whatever letter/number/AI nonsense AMD's marketing department comes up with.
- Keyframe 2y agoI understand it's internal codename, but also can't read it without thinking Asus. Especially considering I have Asus Strix 4090 in my rig.
- casey2 2y agoI thought it was a Halo reference https://www.halopedia.org/Strix-class_harrier https://www.halopedia.org/Strix-class_harrier
- ajma 2y agoReminds me when I was Amazon, one of our tablets was codenamed Thor. We could ask the device what it's codename was and we special cases some functionality for the tablet we built. But it was the same code we used for the android app and it turned out some other tablet manufacturer used the codename Thor and all of a sudden the code was super broken on that device.
- Tepix 2y agoI think having a (small desktop) system with Strix Halo plus a GPU to accelerate prompt processing could be a good combo, avoiding the weakness of the Mac Ultra. The Strix Halo has 16 PCIe lanes.
- aurareturn 2y agoMax RAM for Strix Halo is 128GB. It's not a competitor to the Mac Ultra which goes up to 512GB. You shouldn't need another GPU to do prompt processing for Strix Halo since the biggest model it can realistically run is a 70B model. Prompt processing isn't going to help much because it has a good enough GPU but its memory bandwidth is only 256GB/s (~210 GB/s effective).
- izacus 2y ago> Max RAM for Strix Halo is 128GB. It's not a competitor to the Mac Ultra which goes up to 512GB. What a... strange statement. How did you get to that conclusion?
- aurareturn 2y agoWhy do you think it's strange?
- izacus 2y agoThe original poster arrogantly and confidently proclaims that a device that costs like 2000$ isn't going to be able to compete against a 10000$ SKU of another device. I'm wondering how do you get to such a conclusion?
- aurareturn 2y agoI honestly don't understand what you're trying to say.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- noelwelsh 2y agoFor me the question is: what does this mean for future of desktop CPUs? High bandwidth unified memory seems very compelling for many applications, but the GPU doesn't have as much juice as a separate unit. Are we going to see more these supposedly laptop APUs finding their way into desktops, and essentially a bifurcation of desktops into APUs and discrete CPU/GPUs? Or will desktop CPUs also migrate to becoming APUs?
- Tepix 2y agoiGPUs have been getting ever closer to entry level and even mid-range GPUs. In addition there's a interest in having a lot of memory for LLM acceleration. I expect both CPUs to get more LLM acceleration capabilities and desktop pc memory bandwidth to increase from its current rather slow dual channel 64bit DDR5-6000 status quo. We're already hearing the first rumors for Medusa Halo coming in 2026 with 50% more bandwidth than Strix Halo.
- Gravityloss 2y agoThis has been the case for decades now. GPU:s have existed about 30 years. Embedded ones for 20 years or so? Why are the embedded GPU:s always so stunted?
- aurareturn 2y agoWhy are the embedded GPU:s always so stunted? Memory bandwidth. Besides LLMs, gaming on an iGPU will always be more expensive for the same performance as dedicated GPUs due to memory bandwidth. Before someone tells me consoles using iGPUs, keep in mind that consoles use GDDR as its main system memory which has slow access times for the CPU. In a non-console, CPU performance is important. GDDR is also power hungry so they can't be used as the main system RAM in a laptop form.
- pixelfarmer 2y ago> Memory bandwidth. It is the thermal envelope that defines pretty much everything nowadays. Without active management of it chips would die a heat death very fast. Which also means chips are designed with a certain chip external heat management in mind. The more heat you can get out of a system and away from a chip, the more powerful you can design these things. And game consoles do have active cooling, i.e. they sit between desktop PCs and thin laptops, probably sharing the thermal handling capacity with larger gaming laptops, if anything.
- ryukoposting 2y agoInteresting read, and interesting product. If I understand it right, this seems like it could be at home in a spiritual successor to the Hades Canyon NUCs. I always thought those were neat. I wish Chips and Cheese would clean up transcripts instead of publishing verbatim. Maybe I'll use the GPU on my Strix Halo to generate readable transcripts of Chips and Cheese interviews.
- keyringlight 2y agoThe Framework desktop seems like a next step. Although I appreciate the drive for small profile I wonder where the limits are if you put a big tower cooler onto it, seeing as the broad design direction is for laptops or consoles I doubt there's too much left on the table. I think that highlights a big challenge - is there a sizeable enough market for it, or can you pull in customers from other segments to buy a NUC instead. You'd need a certain amount of mass manufacturing with a highly integrated design to make it worthwhile.
- jorvi 2y ago> can you pull in customers from other segments to buy a NUC instead I've never understood the hype for NUCs for non-office settings. You can make SFF builds that are tiny and still fit giant GPUs like the RTX 3090 /4090, say less for something like a 4080 Super. And then you can upgrade the GPU and (woe is you) CPU later on. Although a high-end X3D will easily last you 2-3 GPU generations.
- woodrowbarlow 2y agoi feel like high-end mini-ITX builds only became viable a few years ago with the introduction of 700W+ SFX PSUs.
- kccqzy 2y agoThe size of NUCs is much smaller than any SFF builds with RTX 3090. Some people just like smallness.
- randomNumber7 2y agoAs long as they cant even provide something similiar to a simple CUDA C API on consumer hardware i dont buy their stuff.
- pjmlp 2y agoThere is no such thing as simple CUDA C API, that is the mistake most folks do when talking about CUDA. It won over OpenCL, because it is a polyglot ecosystem, with first tier support for C, C++, Fortran, and Python (JIT DSL), plus several languages that have toolchains targeting PTX, the IDE integration, graphical debugger, compute and graphical rendering libraries. All of the above AMD and Intel could have provided for OpenCL, but never did when it mattered, not even after SPIR was introduced. Now they finally have GPGPU support for Fortran, C++, Python JIT DSLs, but a bit too late to the party, because contrary to NVidia it isn't like those tools are available regardless of the card.
- randomNumber7 2y agoThe early versions had been only C. Then they added a lot of stuff. You don't need all the fancy stuff, but OpenCL (and even more so Vulkan) are too complicated when all you want to do is some gpu number crunching. Being able to write a kernel with something that looks like C. Having pointers on gpu and cpu and being able to call these kernels somewhat conveniently (like CUDA C) would be a great starting point.
- pjmlp 2y agoEarly meaning until CUDA 3.0 in 2010, we are now on CUDA 12.8, 15 years later.
- heraldgeezer 2y agoCool I guess for a mini PC but Im one of those desktop PC tower nerds :)
- hulk-konen 2y agoI hope they make this in ATX (or mATX) form factor, toss out all the size, energy, and heat concerns, and add more ports and interfaces.
- heraldgeezer 2y agoAt those sizes, just get a real CPU and GPU separate. Was my point.
- FloatArtifact 2y agoSeems like Apple's M2 is a sweet spot for AI performance at 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth which can be added under $1,500 refurbished for 65 gigs of RAM.
- crazystar 2y agoWhere for $1500?
- runjake 2y agoNot on Apple Refurbs. That would cost you about $2200. And the M2 Max has a memory bandwidth of 400GB/s.
- sroussey 2y agoI’m guessing a reference to M2 Ultra? Not sure about that price though…
- runjake 2y agoM2 Ultra refurb was over $4,000, last I checked.
- FloatArtifact 2y agoWhoops, I got confused between the Max and the Ultra for memory bandwidth. But I have seen on occasion, months ago, reverbs for that price.
- swiftcoder 2y agoI don't really like these "lightly edited" machine transcripts. There are transcription errors in many paragraphs, just adds that little bit of extra friction when reading.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- elorant 2y agoBut why did they choose to build this as a mobile cpu though? I don’t need 128GB of unified RAM on my laptop. It’s the desktop where things happen.
- cptskippy 2y agoBecause people are accustom to unified memory in laptops and also complain about the low amounts of ram and inability to upgrade. This solves those problems but apparently uncovers a new one.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago> Because people are accustom to unified memory in laptops Surely the vast majority of laptops sold in the last five years don't have unified memory yet.
- zamadatix 2y agoI've never seen a good technical comparison showing what's new between "Unified Memory" vs traditional APUs/iGPUs memory subsystems laptops have had for over a decade, only comparisons to dGPU setups which are rarer in laptops. The biggest differences comparing Apple Silicon or Strix Halo to their predecessors seems to be more about the overall performance scale, particularly of the iGPU, than the way memory is shared. Articles and blogposts most commonly reference: - The CPU/GPU memory are shared (does not have to be dedicated to be used by either). - You don't need to copy data in memory to move it between the CPU/GPU. - It still uses separate caches for the CPU & GPU but the two are able to talk to each other directly on the same die instead of an external bus. But these have long been true of traditional APUs/iGPUs, not new changes. I did even see some claims Apple put the memory on die too and that's what makes it unified but checking that it seems to still actually be "on package", which isn't unique either, and it wouldn't explain any differences in access patterns anyways. I've been particularly confused as to why Strix Halo would now qualify as having Unified Memory when it doesn't seem anything is different than before, save the performance. If anyone has a deeper understanding of what's new in the Unified Memory approach it'd be appreciated!
- zbrozek 2y agoI really want LPDDR5X (and future better versions) to become standard on desktops, alongside faster and more-numerous memory controllers to increase overall bandwidth. Why hasn't CAMM gotten anywhere? I also really want an update to typical form factors and interconnects of desktop computers. They've been roughly frozen for decades. Off the top of my head: - Move to single-voltage power supplies at 36-57 volts. - Move to bladed power connectors with fewer pins. - Get rid of the "expansion card" and switch to twinax ribbon interconnects. - Standardize on a couple sizes of "expansion socket" instead, putting the high heat-flux components on the bottom side of the board. - Redesign cases to be effectively a single ginormous heatsink with mounting sockets to accept things which produce heat. - Kill SATA. It's over. - Use USB-C connectors for both power and data for internal peripherals like disks. Now there's no difference between internal and external peripherals.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago> Why hasn't CAMM gotten anywhere? Framework asked AMD if they could use CAMM for their new Framework Desktop. AMD actually humored the request and did some engineering, with simulations. According to Framework, the memory bandwidth on the simulations was less than half of the soldered version. This completely defied the entire point of the chip - the massive 256 bit bus ideal for AI or other GPU-heavy tasks, which allows this chip to offer the features it does. This is also why Framework has apologized for non upgradability, but said it can’t be helped, so enjoy fair and reasonable RAM prices. Previously, it had been speculated that CAMM had a performance penalty, but Framework’s engineer on video saying it was that bad was fairly shocking.
- arghwhat 2y agoI do not believe they were asking for CAMM as replacement for soldered RAM, but as an upgrade for DIMMs in desktop. CAMM is touted as being better than DIMMs when it comes to signal integrity and possible speed. Soldered of course beat any socket, in-package beats any soldered RAM, and on-die beat any external component. That AMD Strix Halo is unable to maintain signal integrity for any socketed RAM is a Strix Halo problem, not a socket problem. They probably backed themselves a bit into a corner with other parts of the design sacrifying tolerances on the memory side, and it's a lot easier to push motherboard design requirements than redoing a chip. If this wasn't a Strix Halo issue, then they would have been able to run with socketed memory with a lower memory clock. All CPUs, this one included, has variable memory clocks that could be utilized and perform memory training as even the PCB traces to the chip cause significant signal degradation.
- runjake 2y agoWhen, if ever, will this be released as a bare processor/memory/motherboard combination that I can buy and throw in my own case? Does anyone know?
- colejohnson66 2y agoFramework Desktop https://frame.work/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300 https://frame.work/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300
- Timshel 2y agoFramework is selling the board as a stand alone: https://frame.work/fr/en/products/framework-desktop-mainboard-amd-ryzen-ai-max-300-series?v=FRAFMK0006 https://frame.work/fr/en/products/framework-desktop-mainboar... Too bad there isn't a full PCIe (might not be enough bandwidth left) :(.
- runjake 2y agoI was looking to see if they sold only the motherboard just last night and failed. Thanks!! $1,299 (64GB) and $1,599 USD (128GB) for the motherboards. Yikes, but I get why.
- wmf 2y agoHere's one motherboard: https://frame.work/products/framework-desktop-mainboard-amd-ryzen-ai-max-300-series?v=FRAFMK0002 https://frame.work/products/framework-desktop-mainboard-amd-... I wouldn't be surprised if Minisforum also offers a motherboard.
- sourtrident 2y agoFascinating how Strix Halo feels like AMD's spiritual successor to their ATI merger dreams - finally delivering desktop-class graphics and CPU power in a genuinely portable form factor. Can't wait to see where it pushes laptop capabilities.