AMD's next-gen Strix Point APU for laptops and, we assume, gaming handhelds has been rumoured for so long it's taken on an almost mythical quality. But thanks to the, it's here at last and looks like an absolute beast, with more CPU cores, more GPU compute units, a much more powerful NPU, the whole works.
Clock speeds are comparable to previous APUs but what isn't is the core counts. Where the old 7000-series Phoenix and 8000-series Hawk Point APUs—as seen in various laptops and gaming handhelds—had up to eight CPU cores, Strix Point packs four Zen 5 cores and up to eight Zen 5C cores. Meanwhile, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 loses two Zen 5C cores, drops to 34MB of cache and runs a tiny bit slower at 5GHz. And yes, that's correct, one is a Ryzen AI 9"HX" chip, the other is simply Ryzen AI 9. Tech branding, go figure.The other major element, of course, is graphics. Strix Point ups the graphics CU count from the 12 CUs of its previous best APU to 16 CUs for the top Ryzen AI 9 HX chip. The non-HX model sticks with the same 12 CUs as the Ryzen 7 7840U and 8840U.
Notably, AMD stated that it delivers all of its performance capabilities with"no emulation required", a clear dig at the Snapdragon chip and its Arm CPU cores, which will need to emulate any legacy x86 apps that aren't available in native Arm format.Speaking of performance, how does this new APU stack up? So far, we only have a few AMD metrics to go on.