Another shipping manifest containing information on printed circuit boards reveals an even more extreme variant of the rumored AMD Strix Halo APU in the wild. The mobile processor is already threatening to be the beefiest APUs AMD has ever produced, mobile or otherwise, and has now been spotted paired with 128GB of onboard RAM.
Customs data tracking site NewBid Data revealed a new shipment of Maple Rev.B PCBs shipped on May 27, though tech news outlets have only spotted the manifest today. The “Maple” circuit board assembly has been previously associated with Strix Halo test boards, with Maple Rev.A being the name of the PCBA of previously reported Strix Halo boards with 32GB and 64GB of RAM. The 120W TDP of the chip from previous revisions remains on the newest variant.
The possibility of 128GB of RAM has made Strix Halo an even more exciting product. By way of a disclaimer, AMD has never officially confirmed the existence of Strix Halo, though months of leaks have led most to treat it as fact. Sharing a name with Strix Point, the internal codename for AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series of mobile processors launching in laptops in July, Strix Halo’s currently leaked form seems stronger than AMD’s current-gen APUs powering PlayStations and Xboxes.
The Strix Halo APU is expected to be a multi-chip package thanks to the die-to-die Infinity Fabric interconnection AMD is known for. Two separate CPU dies will live on the chip together with a GPU die; the CPU portion of the APU will be 16 Zen 5 cores that turbo up to 5.8 GHz with a 64MB L3 cache, while graphics will be powered by up to 40 RDNA 3.5 cores at 16x PCIe 4.0 speeds. The processing and graphics will also share a 32MB L4 “Infinity” cache. Strix Halo will also reportedly come with a NPU capable of 70 TOPS, breezing past today’s “AI PC” minimum spec.
We considered 64GB RAM to be overkill when we first saw Maple test boards shipping with it onboard, so 128GB and 120W TDP truly feel like excess for gaming applications. The extreme TDP and RAM are likely for speculative testing to push the APU to its extreme limits and see how it performs when supercharged with huge power draw and huge tracts of RAM. However, it is still possible that these are the top-end specs AMD will ship Strix Halo with. Halo has been associated with power users and prosumers who may use the chip for content creation, AI workloads, 3D rendering, and other demanding applications. With its beefy specs and self-contained footprint, Strix Halo will fit within much slimmer machines than a comparable CPU/mobile GPU combo. Many speculate that Strix Halo will be seen inside a handheld gaming PC.
We have no confirmed launch date for Strix Halo products or even official confirmation of the chip’s existence. We’ll get our first taste of Zen 5 architecture when Strix Point comes out in July, and hopefully, Strix Halo will be quick to follow.