Sunday, January 12th 2025
AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ Mini PC: GMK Announces Strix Halo-Powered Compact System
At CES, AMD unleashed the much awaited Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" APUs with mammoth iGPUs, up to a whopping 40 CUs for the Radeon 8060S. These chips are powerful enough to not require discrete graphics at all, making them ideal for mini PCs, which lack the physical room for dedicated graphics. GMK appears to be among the first to announce a mini PC with the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU, although any further details are under wraps as of now.
Unlike the Strix Point parts, Strix Halo abandons the smaller and more efficient Zen 5c cores for a Zen 5-only setup, with up to 16 Zen 5 cores for the highest-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SKU. This allows for some serious performance potential, with AMD promising substantially better performance than both Intel's Lunar Lake and Apple's M4 Pro, although it would be much fairer to compare Strix Halo to Apple's M4 Max, and Intel's Arrow Lake-H/X instead. Regardless, there is no denying Strix Halo APUs open up new doors in terms of performance for compact systems, the rest remains to be seen as and when the products reach reviewers.
Source:
Notebookcheck
Unlike the Strix Point parts, Strix Halo abandons the smaller and more efficient Zen 5c cores for a Zen 5-only setup, with up to 16 Zen 5 cores for the highest-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 SKU. This allows for some serious performance potential, with AMD promising substantially better performance than both Intel's Lunar Lake and Apple's M4 Pro, although it would be much fairer to compare Strix Halo to Apple's M4 Max, and Intel's Arrow Lake-H/X instead. Regardless, there is no denying Strix Halo APUs open up new doors in terms of performance for compact systems, the rest remains to be seen as and when the products reach reviewers.
43 Comments on AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ Mini PC: GMK Announces Strix Halo-Powered Compact System
That's a mighty amount of GPU-compute.
But pricing is gonna be, well, interesting.
Logo even worse, looks so cheap.
I'm wondering if DDR5 has gotten faster to mitigate this problem.
Alternatively, they might use LPDDR5 which has been getting surprisingly fast. Still slower than GDDR(whatever) but dedicated Laptop/Phone RAM is surprisingly fast these days.
But yes, it appears to be 256-bit LPDDR5. Very promising.
It means the remaining days of configurable RAM are few. I guess it's already the norm in Laptops and Phones, but still sad to see this encroaching upon desktop space.
It's only for AI though which I'm convinced remains niche. These AI algorithms really wants a lot of RAM Bandwidth at lower prices than Graphics RAM.
Video games need faster RAM. Servers need more RAM. Desktops are now in an awkward spot with DDR5 just not the best anymore
Edit: not to mention this thing looks way nicer than the GMK box
www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/z2-mini-a.html
But yea, I agree they are definitely that for sure !
Unlike some other mini-me boxes (including mine), which are fairly attractive while being space saving & reasonably performant at the same time...
At the end of the day, it's really just if the hardware does what you need, and Stix Halo won't be much different than those Macs with soldered RAM. What you see is what you get.
I'm impressed with this setup. But it depends on the price, what's everyone thinking? I think $3k would be a bit steep but a fair price. I can definitely see them trying to sell this stuff for $5k+ though