The upcoming Ryzen AI MAX 395+ from AMD’s Ryzen 300 or Zen 5 family of APUs has emerged atGeekbenchwith performance that’s largely identical to the desktop Ryzen 9 7950X processor — at least in short bursts. The 395+ is seen powering the upcoming ROG Flow Z13 laptop from Asus, expected to debut atCESnext month. Against the last-gen Ryzen 9 7945HX, AMD has managed to extract a massive 22% performance uplift with Strix Halo.
The enthusiast laptop market will soon be greeted by AMD’s flagship APUs codenamed “Strix Halo” under the Ryzen AI MAX Pro lineup. Likely to arrive at CES, these APUs reportedly serve as a one-stop solution for workstation laptops uniting Zen 5 cores with a powerful RDNA 3.5 iGPU (Integrated GPU) on a single chip.
Rumorhas it that the top-endRadeon8060S may be configured with up to 40 CUs (Compute Units) with support for fast LPDDR5X-8000 memory. Strix Halo is a one-of-a-kind product and should not be confused with the flagship-gradeFire Rangeseries, succeeding Dragon Range (Ryzen 7045HX).
The test bench features theAsus ROG Flow Z13 “GZ302EA,“listings for which surfaced a few days ago at a Belarusian retailer. Geekbench reports the Ryzen AI MAX 395+ with 16 cores and 32 threads based on AMD’s Zen 5 architecture. The CPU offers a base frequency of 3 GHz, going as high as 5.1 GHz. Much like 16-core desktop chips from AMD, the 395+ is equipped with 64MB of L3 cache and 16MB of L2 cache.
Impressive scores of 2928 points and 19484 points in the single-core and multi-core categories, respectively, land the Ryzen AI MAX 395+ largely on par with the Ryzen 9 7950X. The limited clock speeds prevent it from breaching the 3,000 barrier when it comes to single-core performance. However, multi-core sees it pass with flying colors, beating the Ryzen 9 7945HX by 22%. Notably, the relatively short-duration Geekbench benchmark leads to ideal scores for the chip, as the chip will heat up and likely slow as it runs longer-durationbenchmarks.
Realistically, Strix Halo has no direct equivalent from Intel’s side and is more targeted as a competitor to Apple’s M-series chips. It wouldn’t make sense to compare Arrow Lake versus Strix Halo as the latter employs a much larger integrated GPU. Judging from the leaks, the Radeon 8060S powering the graphical end of the 395+ offers 40 CUs, which is 25% more than the Radeon RX 7600. If priced accordingly, this configuration could give upcoming RTX 5060 laptops a run for their money.
AMD is expected to reveal Strix Halo alongsideKrackan Pointand theRDNA 4 familyat CES next month.
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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
