There's a new purported leak of AMD's laptop U range, called AMD Strix Halo, which shows the layout and some of the key specs of the all-in-one mobile chip. The main leak concerns speculation of the layout of the chip, but also reaffirms previously leaked information that the chip will have 40 RDNA compute units in its GPU, which is more than the 32 compute units in a desktop AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT graphics card.
Widely expected to offer a level of performance that could see best gaming laptop list, AMD Strix Halo is a highly anticipated launch.
The new GPU of Strix Halo is expected to use the RDNA 3.5+ architecture, which is an extension of the current RDNA 3 architecture used in the company's latest graphics cards, such as the RX 7600 XT. The chief addition is expected to be some enhanced AI hardware, or NPU, rather than major graphics procesgrades.
Nonetheless, the sheer gaming horsepower that could be packed into Strix Halo is quite something. 40 RDNA compute units equates to 2,560 stream processors, 80 AI accelerators, and 40 ray accelerators. Again, all these numbers outclass the RX 7600 XT and come close to the power of the AMD U beats the PS5 for GPU power.
On the U side, Strix Halo looks just as impressive, with the top tier variant of the chip reportedly set to include 16 cores running at up to 5.8GHz. That's not quite up there with Intel's 6.2GHz Core i9 14900KS desktop U, but it's speedy for a mobile chip.
The new chip layout images have been generated by s of the chiphell forum after reportedly seeing images of the chip dies. As such, these are the estimated arrangement of the chiplets - the smaller silicon dies that are brought together onto a single package to form a single U or APU - with Strix Halo expected to have a single SoC die and two core chiplet dies (CCDs). The SoC will house the GPU, IO, memory controller, and other ancillary bits, while the CCDs contain the U cores, with each CCD packing in eight cores.
Some speculative performance charts have also been put together that show Strix Halo beating the likes of the Intel Core i9 14900HX for U performance, while competing with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060M and RTX 4070M for GPU performance.
As ever with leaks, this could all turn out to be not true, as AMD hasn't confirmed any of these details so far, but the pattern of leaks regarding Strix Halo has been consistent so far, giving us fewer reasons not to believe the hype. The key question will be whether all this processing power can be delivered at once. Will thermal or power limitations reduce the potential performance, and how till battery life be affected?
While we wait to find out exactly what Strix Halo can do - expect to find out more at Computex 2024 in June - you can browse our current picks of the best gaming laptops in our comprehensive guide.