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AMD's Chiplet APU: An Overview of Strix Halo
- oDot 1y agoI read somewhere, but can't remember where, that a major reason those APUs aren't as efficient as the Apple ones is a conscious decision to share the architecture with Epyc and therefore accept worse efficiency at lower wattage as a tradeoff. Can someone confirm/refute that?
- christkv 1y agoThey are ok but yeah they do not have anything like the memory bandwidth of an m3 ultra. But they also cost a lot less. I’m primarily looking to replace my older desktop but just have to make sure i can run an external gpu like the A6000 that i can borrow from work without having to spend a week fiddling with settings or parameters
- jeswin 1y agoIn this review, Hardware Canucks tested [1] the M4 Pro (3nm 2nd gen) and the 395+ (4nm) at 50w and found the performance being somewhat comparable. The differences can be explained away by 3nm vs 4nm. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo
- aurareturn 1y agoIt isn’t comparable at all. In MT, maybe it is comparable with the M4 Pro still winning. In ST, it is 3-4x ahead of Strix Halo in efficiency.
- kllrnohj 1y ago> In ST, it is 3-4x ahead of Strix Halo in efficiency. The Hardware Canucks video didn't seem to do any such investigation, where did you get that number from?
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoIt seems like a comparison of the battery life under light loads (accounting for the vast majority of the difference) multiplied by some unspecified single thread performance benchmark? But under light loads laptop battery life is dominated by things like the screen rather than the CPU, and on top of that the Macbook has a larger battery. Meanwhile under the heavy loads that actually tax the processor the M4 somehow has worse battery life even with the larger battery and a nominally lower TDP. Is the infamous efficiency not the processor at all and they're just winning on the basis of choosing more efficient displays and wireless chips?
- jamiek88 1y agoHow the heck is a 3.6x faster single thread M4 Pro 'comparable'? Which by the way you can buy in a $600 prebuilt not $2500 if you can even find this unobtanium chip.
- kllrnohj 1y agowhere are you seeing 3.6x faster single thread performance???
- tredre3 1y agoGeekbench 6 scores vary based on cooling but the 395+ hangs out around 3000 and the M4 Pro around 3600, how is that 3.6x?
- canucker2016 1y agoWhere can you buy a $600 mac with an M4 Pro? The M4 mac mini at $599 comes with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD - see https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/apple-m4-chip-with-10-core-cpu-and-10-core-gpu-16gb-memory-256gb https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/apple-m4-chip-wi... The M4 Pro mac mini starts at $1399 with 24GB RAM and 512GB SSD - see https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/apple-m4-pro-chip-with-12-core-cpu-16-core-gpu-24gb-memory-512gb https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/apple-m4-pro-chi...
- christkv 1y agoI love the concept of it and have been thinking about getting one the only problem I see right now is no ability as far as I can see to get an external dock to run an additional external gpu in the future.
- izacus 1y agoI'm not sure what do you mean? I'm running eGPU with my Strix Point laptop via Thunderbolt. I've also seen quite a few mini PCs with Oculink port and Strix Halo CPUs.
- christkv 1y agoI was reading people having problems getting the external cards working if they had a lot of memory?
- Maxious 1y ago> In a Linux context I got some GPUs working and I can add some [external] GPU devices. Minis forum when I reached out to them said they don't officially support either via the Thunderbolt compatibility USB 4, USB4 v2 or even the built-in PCIe slot. Yeah, not technically officially supported and it's because of the resource allocation and the BAR space and they need somebody on the BIOS team to understand that to fix it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvNYpyA1ZGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvNYpyA1ZGk There are ways to manage BAR better in linux or with UEFI preboot environments for windows as hobbyists have been doing for ages due to bad BIOS support https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI
- InTheArena 1y agoThanks for the pointer. I have been struggling to get either a oculink or USB4 PCIe tunnel to work with the framework desktop. HOpefully some clues here.
- rcarmo 1y agoThere are plenty of mini-PCs with USB4 and Oculink, and you can get an M.2 adapter (might be tricky to retrofit into a laptop though).
- rana763 1y ago[dead]
- TulliusCicero 1y agoSo potentially competitive with a 5070M for graphics? Sounds very nice, as long as price and power draw are reasonable.
- makeitdouble 1y agoPower draw is around 75W. It can be manual boosted, but will stay below 100W under all circumstances (from memory, as I was researching the Z13) The chip itself should accept higher power draws, and ASUS usually isn't shy on feeding 130+W to a laptop, so the 75W figure was quite a surprise to me.
- ivape 1y agoI was just thinking the other day that AMD can match Nvidia pound for pound on the raw hardware specs, and if they don’t just yet, they get pretty close. If AI is a bubble, then AMD should not catch up. If there isn’t a bubble, then there is no choice but to learn to use whatever is out there and AMD is truly set to be another trillion dollar company. The 10% stake OpenAI took is going to look like a Google buying YouTube moment in the long run. And it’s worth noting, AMD has always matched up with Nvidia hardware wise for decades, plus or minus. They are an interesting company in that they took on both Nvidia and Intel, and is still continuing to do so.
- chao- 1y agoComparing this against mobile dGPUs and the (finally real) DGX Spark, this feels like a latent market segment that has not arrived at its final form. I don't know what delayed the DGX Spark so long, but it granted AMD a huge boon by allowing them capture some market mindshare first. Compared to discrete GPUs (mobile or not), the advantage of a dGPU is memory bandwidth. The disadvantage of a dGPU is power draw and memory capacity—if we set aside CUDA, which I grant is a HUGE thing to just "set aside". If we mix in the small DGX Spark desktops, then those have an additional advantage in the dual 200Gb network ports that allow for RDMA across multiple boxes. One could get more from of a small stack (2, 3 or 4) of those than from the same number of Strix Halo 395 boxes. However, as sexy as my homelab-brain finds a small stack of DGX Spark boxes with RDMA, I would think that for professional use, I would rather have a GPU server (or Threadripper GPU workstation) than four DGX Spark boxes? Because the DGX Spark isn't being sold in a laptop (AFAIK, CMIIW), that is another differentiator in favor of the Strix Halo. Once again, it points to this being a weird, emerging market segment, and I expect the next generation or two will iterate towards how these capabilities really ought to be packaged.
- wffurr 1y ago“dGPU” usually means “discrete GPU”. Do you mean “iGPU” for “integrated GPU” instead? Strix Halo is also being marketed for gaming but the performance profile is all wrong for that. The CPU is too fast and the iGPU still not strong enough. I am sure it’s amazing at matmul though.
- chao- 1y agoYes, I intended to use the term "discrete GPU" before using "dGPU" as a shorthand for that exact reason (in the second paragraph). I now see that I edited the first paragraph to use "dGPU" without first defining it as such. I also agree that they aren't for gaming (something I know little about). My comment was with respect to compute workloads, but I never specified that. Apologies.
- speed_spread 1y agoAs a casual gamer I'm already okay with the RTX 3050 dGPU on my laptop. Reports put Strix Halo at RTX 4070 level which is massive for an iGPU and certainly allows for 2k single screen gaming. Hardcore gaming will always require a desktop with PCIe boards.
- makeitdouble 1y agoThe saddest part of this is the lack of availability: at this point there's 2 standard laptops using this chip, the Z13 being the only high perf one. There's the Framework lines as well, but they aren't available in many countries, and it's a very specific public. And that's after half a year after the first machines to come to the market. I love the Z13, but it's clearly a niche machine, so I'm assuming they are having a really hard time manufacturing the chips ? All the capacity is getting eaten by Apple ?
- voidmain0001 1y agoHP ZBook Ultra G1a is a great option and can be bought with up to 128GB RAM.
- makeitdouble 1y agoYes. It looks to be the more standard option form factor wise, which is a blessing and a curse. For instance they went for the standard lower resolution display (1920x1440 for 14" vs 2560x1600 for 13" on the Z13). The thermals also looked better on the Z13, which comes partly with the form factor, partly with Asus optimizing for that for so many years. Of cours the Z13 keyboard is meh, I expect most owners to have it detached 90% of the time and handle the machine more like a standalone screen/touch/pen input.
- voidmain0001 1y agoThe upper tier G1a comes with an OLED 2.8K touch display. The vapor chamber cooling on the HP seems efficient, but the back side venting on the flow is clearly better. https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c09119722.pdf https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c09119722.pdf
- makeitdouble 1y agoSounds like it's not available in Japan, or I'm not good enough with HP's site to find the customizable options..but it's good to know!
- mumber_typhoon 1y agoI wonder if higher TDP is possible with framework desktop. That one probably has much better cooling than these laptops with the same chip and if numbers are different.
- AmVess 1y agoI haven't tested the power draw, but I have the mainboard from Framework that I put into a larger ITX case for better cooling. My main PC is a 7950X3D which has the same core count/threads as the Strix unit, and the Strix benches within margin of error as the 7950X3D. Which is to say the performance is the same. That you can get the same computer power in a laptop is crazy.
- spatular 1y agoYes, 140W sustained, 160W burst (~10 seconds).
- rcarmo 1y agoI would love to try out one of the mini-PCs that ship this, but they seem to be made of either platinum (hugely overpriced in EU) or unobtainium (no retailers carry them here, and getting something direct from China is dicey warranty-wise). ROCm 7 looks to be working already under most Linux distros and having this as a workstation with a local LLM or a “home inference server” with Ollama and a few services seems like a great solution.
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- dangus 1y agoROCm is making great progress but I’ve had enough hiccups (desktop with RX9070XT) that I’d still recommend those looking for AI capability to continue using an Nvidia or Apple solution for the time being. Still, I think it’ll be quite equivalent soon. I think one of the best AI systems in terms of price/performance is still just to build a desktop with dual RTX 3090’s (of course you’ll need an board that supports dual cards) and toss it in a closet.
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoIt depends on what you are doing. A lot of people who want to do local inference want to do it using much larger models than what can be fit onto a RTX3090, and Strix Halo is such a hit because it gives you reasonable (not great, but good enough to not be outright painful) performance with 128GB of memory.
- geerlingguy 1y agoAlso, Vulkan is great, and much more stable. Plus tends to work great for new, and even very old, graphics cards.
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- dismalaf 1y ago
- nexle 1y agoHigh Yield has a video that deep dive into the 395 chip on the silicon level: https://youtu.be/maH6KZ0YkXU https://youtu.be/maH6KZ0YkXU
- InTheArena 1y agoI picked up a framework desktop and am running it through it's paces right now. So far, it's a impressive little box. I'm really hopeful that this continues to drive more and more enthusiast support and engagement. Getting strong vulcan or rocm supported infrastructure would be great for everyone.
- runjake 1y agoRelated question: Can I buy a desktop Zen 5 CPU and something like an RX 7600 XT and some RAM and have a high shared memory bandwidth situation between the system memory and the GPU ala Strix Halo and Apple Silicon without spending a ton of money? And get pretty reasonable local LLM performance on some of the larger models for hobbyist use? Edit: I don’t have a good grasp on this but I’m thinking I can only do shared memory when I’m using an APU and not a discrete GPU. Is this correct?
- Rohansi 1y agoNo, memory is not "unified" when you have a physically separate GPU. In that case memory is accessed through the PCIe bus which will be a significant bandwidth bottleneck. PCIe tops out at 64GB/s for 16 lanes of PCIe 5 and not all GPUs support that.
- dzonga 1y agohow does the gpu compare though to the ones in m-series macs ?