AMD's beastly 'Strix Halo' Ryzen AI Max+ matches the RTX 4060 laptop in leaked 3DMark tests

A leaked benchmark of the Radeon 8060S, powering the graphics engine of AMD's Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Halo" flagship is shown to match Nvidia's dedicated RTX 4060 mobile GPU in a leaked 3DMark Time Spy result. A Chinese user at Baidu (via HXL), shared a couple of screenshots with what appears to be the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 flexing its muscles, beating AMD's latest Radeon 890M iGPU by almost 3x. Since the tested sample is based on early engineering silicon, there is surely still some room for improvement. However, this leak should be viewed cautiously as the CPU OPN code and the integrated GPU don't align.

AMD extended its Ryzen AI 300 lineup with mainstream Krackan Point and flagship Strix Halo APUs last month at CES. Strix Halo, or Ryzen AI Max+ is a one-of-a-kind processor delivering (up to) 16 Zen 5 CPU cores bundled with 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units for workstation-grade laptops and high-end mini-PCs. Bear in mind, all this power is packaged on a single chip, featuring two CCDs and a massive I/O die beneath, bordered by (up to) 128GB of fast unified memory. For context, AMD's marketing material positions the Radeon 8060S (the subject of this article) as an equivalent to Nvidia's RTX 4070 laptop dGPU.

It's kind of pointless to compare laptops with different TGPs and thermal designs so it's best not to read too much into these results. For the sake of comparison, we'll look over the average Time Spy score of several relevant GPUs, obtained via 3DMark's score explorer feature. Another screenshot shows that the laptop or mini-PC in question features 128GB (16GBx8) of LPDDR5-8532 memory, with 96GB allocated to the iGPU. Both screenshots inaccurately label the iGPU as the Radeon 8050S, however, the OPN code reveals it's actually the Radeon 8060S with a 40 CU configuration. That's probably due to the silicon's premature nature.

In 3DMark's Time Spy benchmark, the Radeon 8060S scores 10,106 points, almost matching Nvidia's RTX 4060 laptop and AMD's own RX 7700S. Against the Radeon 890M seen on Strix Point, the 8060S lands ahead by a gigantic 2.7x but that was kind of expected given the large difference in shader counts. Still, it loses to the RTX 4070 by almost 20% which is disappointing but you should wait for independent reviews to see how these Strix Halo APUs perform in real-world scenarios.

You should see laptops and workstations equipped with these processors from partners across Q1 and Q2 this year, which is a rather vague timeframe. HP is readying the ZBook Ultra G1a workstation laptop and the HP Z2 Mini G1a mini-PC, while Asus has announced the ROG Flow Z13, with no definite release date provided for any system.