AMD slides claim Strix Halo can beat the RTX 4070 laptop GPU by up to 68% in modern games

At CES, AMD unveiled its Ryzen AI 300 flagship lineup codenamed Strix Halo with a beastly configuration of 16 cores, 40 Compute Units, and 128GB of unified memory. New first-party benchmarks assert that the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 - that's a mouthful - is up to 68% faster than Nvidia's RTX 4070 mobile graphics in gaming. The slides also showcase how Strix Halo holds up versus Apple's M4-series chips in productivity and even dare to mention the desktop RTX 4090.

Strix Halo is split into three dies with two CCDs offering eight cores each and a large I/O die housing the iGPU (Integrated GPU) and the NPU. The highest-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 packs 16 cores and 32 central processor threads based on the Zen 5 architecture, accompanied by the Radeon 8060S iGPU with 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units. All the AI Max chips have a base TDP of 55W, and can be configured from 45W to 120W. Surrounding the chip is up to 128GB of unified memory, which can be allocated in varying pools (up to 96GB) to the iGPU alone.

With the specs out of the way, let's talk performance. The Nvidia comparison system is the Asus ROG Flow Z13 with the i9-13900H and the RTX 4070 mobile (65W TGP). Across a suite of 17 games at 1080p high settings, Strix Halo handily bests its Nvidia equivalent, with an up to 68% lead in Borderlands 3, per AMD. Being first-party benchmarks, we shouldn't take them at face value. It is also prudent to mention that the RTX 4070 mobile can be configured up to 115W, but a 65W variant features in this comparison, due to the Asus ROG Flow Z13 design.

In productivity tests, Blender sees the 395+ blaze past the Core Ultra 9 288V (Lunar Lake) by 302% but that isn't an apples-to-apples comparison since the latter is a 17/30W chip. Versus Apple's M4 Pro, AMD touts an 86% lead in V-Ray, dropping to 12% in Cinebench R24. Moving over to AI performance, the XDNA 2 NPU enables the Ryzen AI MAX series to dish out 50 TOPS of AI performance, exceeding the Lunar Lake and Snapdragon X Elite series by two TOPS. AMD also claims its Strix Halo APUs can deliver 2.2x more tokens per second than the RTX 4090 when running the Llama 70B LLM (Large Language Model) at 1/6th the TDP (75W).

(Image credit: AMD)

(Image credit: AMD)

We highly suggest you wait for independent testing before jumping the gun, like perhaps pre-ordering a Strix Halo device. These laptops are likely to target enthusiasts as suitable alternatives to dedicated GPU options. With Strix Point laptops still costing over $1,000, pricing will play a key role in determining if Strix Halo can displace dedicated mid-ranged laptop GPUs like the RTX 4070 can be found in.