AMD Linux engineers have been working on "GFX1150" and "GFX1151" targets for a while—official references to "Strix 1/Strix Point" and "Strix Point Halo" have appeared several times on official development channels. Phoronix's head honcho—Michael Larabel—monitors these activities with keen interest, his latest finding indicates that Team Red is preparing open-source RadeonSI/RADV driver support for the GFX1151 IP. Their MESA 24.1 update merges in GPU enablement for possible high-end "Strix Point Halo" laptop processors—tech tipsters believe that these chiplet variants could sport up to sixteen Zen 5 CPU cores and forty RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

AMD's enablement of the "GFX1150/Strix Point" GPU appeared online late last month—these monolithic laptop chips are alleged to sit below "Strix Point Halo" in Team Red's product hierarchy. Insiders suggest that the best configurations could house twelve Zen 5 CPU cores and sixteen RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. Phoronix posited that the "RDNA 3 refresh" graphics solution: "is just rumored for select APUs, while ultimately we'll see where this GFX 11.5.1 IP is found if for some further upgraded APU or something more special. In any event the open-source Linux driver support is coming together." According to official product roadmaps, the initial batch of "Strix Point" mobile chips are expected ship later this year—representing a proper next-gen upgrade over current "Hawk Point" offerings.

AMD's next generation Ryzen mobile processor family is undergoing a significant re-positioning of IP within its product stack, as the company introduces the new "elite experience" segment. The "Fire Range" mobile processor is a direct successor to "Dragon Range" MCM, with two 8-core "Zen 5" chiplets. It is essentially a BGA package of the desktop "Granite Ridge" processor, and comes with up to 16 "Zen 5" cores, for flagship gaming notebooks and mobile workstations. A segment below the current "Dragon Range" is the current "Hawk Point" silicon, driving premium experiences. There is a rather large CPU performance gap between the two, as would be the case between the upcoming "Fire Range" and "Kraken Point," which is why AMD is creating the "elite experience" segment, and filling it with "Strix Halo" and "Strix Point," which will square off against Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 9 processors, as well as certain HX-segment 14th Gen Core mobile processors. "Strix Point" has a significant core-count increase to 12, along with a large iGPU. We've extensively covered "Strix Point" in our older article, but now we have more information on the elusive "Kraken Point."

"Kraken Point" is codename for AMD's next-generation monolithic mobile processor silicon being designed to power Ryzen processor SKUs competing against the bulk of Intel Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7 SKUs. This chip will be built on a refined 4 nm EUV node by TSMC, and will be monolithic. Its most interesting aspect is the CPU complex. It reportedly features a combination of four regular "Zen 5" cores, and four "Zen 5c" low power cores. All eight cores will likely share a single CCX, which means they share a common L3 cache, which enables easy movement of threads between the two kinds of cores, without having to make round-trips to the DRAM.

References to GFX1150 & GFX1151 targets have been spotted again—this time in a ROCm Github repository—by renowned hardware sleuth; Kepler_L2. These references were first spotted last summer, in an AMDGPU LLVM backend/compiler (reported by Phoronix)—industry experts immediately linked these target codes to next generation "Strix" APU families. The latest leak provides confirmation that the GFX1150 ID is tied to "Strix Point 1," while GFX1151 is an internal IP for "Strix Point Halo," or simply "Strix Halo." The freshly published ROCm Github's commit is titled: "Strix Halo Support and Strix support in staging," which corroborates previous rumors regarding Team Red's engineers being deep into development of Zen 5 (and RDNA 3.5)-based accelerated processing units.

AMD has published several processor product roadmaps with references to "Strix Point" next-gen APUs, with a targeted 2024 launch window. Their December 2023 "Advancing AI Event" confirmed that the "Strix Point" mobile family will sport "XDNA 2" NPUs—previous generation "Phoenix" and recently released "Hawk Point" processors are on the first iteration of XDNA (a spatial dataflow NPU architecture). It is speculated that a typical "Strix Point" laptop processor will pack 12 Zen 5 CPU cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. Team Red has kept quiet about "Strix Halo" (also known as "Sarlak") when conducting public-facing presentations—a loose 2025 launch window is being touted by the rumor mill. The most advanced examples could feature up to 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

With Windows 11 23H2 setting the stage for increased prevalence of AI in client PC use cases, the new hardware battleground between AMD and its rivals Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm, will be in equipping their mobile processors with sufficient AI acceleration performance. AMD already introduced accelerated AI with the current "Phoenix" processor that debuts Ryzen AI, and its Xilinx XDNA hardware backend that provides a performance of up to 16 TOPS. This will see a 2-3 fold increase with the company's 2024-25 mobile processor lineup, according to a roadmap leak by "Moore's Law is Dead."

At the very top of the pile, in a product segment called "ultimate compute," which consists of large gaming notebooks, mobile workstations, and desktop-replacements; the company's current Ryzen 7045 "Dragon Range" processor will continue throughout 2024. Essentially a non-socketed version of the desktop "Raphael" MCM, "Dragon Range" features up to two 5 nm "Zen 4" CCDs for up to 16 cores, and a 6 nm cIOD. This processor lacks any form of AI acceleration. In 2025, the processor will be succeeded with "Fire Range," a similar non-socketed, mobile-friendly MCM that's derived from "Granite Ridge," with up to two 4 nm "Zen 5" CCDs for up to 16 cores; and the 6 nm cIOD. What's interesting to note here, is that the quasi-roadmap makes no mention of AI acceleration for "Fire Range," which means "Granite Ridge" could miss out on Ryzen AI acceleration from the processor. Modern discrete GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD support AI accelerators, so this must have been AMD's consideration to exclude an XDNA-based Ryzen AI accelerator on "Fire Range" and "Granite Ridge."