AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” APU-Powered Laptops Launched: Combine Zen 5 CPU, RDNA 3.5 GPU & XDNA 2 NPU Cores, First Die Shot Pictured

AMD has officially launched its first Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” APU-powered laptops which combine Zen 5 CPU, RDNA 3.5 GPU & XDNA 2 NPU cores.

AMD’s First Copilit+ Ready APUs Are Here! Meet The Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” Family For Laptops, Equipped With Up To 12 Zen 5 Cores, 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU Cores & 55 TOPS XDNA 2 NPU

The AI PC ecosystem is evolving by the second as everyone tries to get a piece of the cake. AMD was essentially the first chipmaker to introduce an “AI PC” SOC with its Phoenix APU family back in 2023 and this was followed by the release of the much improved Hawk Point series which offered higher NPU TOPS.

With the arrival of the Microsoft Copilot+ PC platform, AMD is going even grander & introducing its Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” platform which combines several aspects to meet the demand for these next-gen transformational AI experiences in the consumer world. For AMD, the goals are very clear, to offer increased AI performance, offering rich new GenAI & Copilot+ experiences, and all while doing so locally on the PC.

So today, AMD is finally launching its its new Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” APU family for laptops and the naming might confuse you a bit but it’s a fresh new approach to a new beginning of the AI PC ecosystem. AMD’s Ryzen naming scheme over the past two generations looks like the following:

• Ryzen 7040 (Phoenix) -> Ryzen 8040 (Hawk) -> Ryzen AI 300 (Strix)

The starting from 300 series is to mark the 3rd Generation of the AI PC APU with Phoenix being the first and Hawk being the second. It’s also mentioned that with Ryzen AI, AMD is converging its portfolio & no longer relying on a fixed TDP for a select SKU. So they don’t have to use the U/H/HS series branding anymore. Instead, AMD is giving OEMs the flexibility to adjust these APUs to their demands with TDPs of 15W and up to 54W. The “HX” designation will mark the cream of the crop SKU while the non-HX SKUs will be the power-conservative designs.

As mentioned above, the AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” APUs combine three major core technologies which include:

• Zen 5 (CPU Cores)
• RDNA 3.5 (GPU Cores)
• XDNA 2 (NPU Cores)

AMD Zen 5 is a brand new architecture (full deep-dive here) which has made will also be introduced on several other processor families such as the Ryzen 9000 “Granite Ridge” Desktop CPUs for high-end PCs and 5th Gen EPYC “Turin” CPUs for data centers.

The AMD Strix APUs are still based on a singular, monolithic die based on the TSMC 4nm process node and come with up to 12 cores and 24 threads which employ both Zen 5 and Zen 5C cores. This approach is done to achieve maximum efficiency with the Zen 5C cores and maximum performance with the Zen 5 cores since the former tend to run at a slightly lower clock speed while retaining the same ISA. The Strix APU die measures 12.06×18.71mm or close to 225 mm2.

The AMD RDNA 3.5 iGPU for the Ryzen AI “Strix” APUs is now optimized and features certain architectural updates along with support for a higher number of compute units which add up to 16 for the flagship part.

Some of the enhancements made to RDNA 3.5 over RDNA 3 architecture were optimized perf/watt, optimized perf/bit, and better power management for higher battery life. The AMD RDNA 3.5 GPUs features:

• 2x Texture Sampler Rate: The Subset of the most common texture sampling operations is now double rate for common game texture ops.
• 2x Interpolation and Comparison Rates: Most of the rich vector ISA for interpolation & comparison is now double the rate for common Ops in shaders.
• Improved Memory Management: Improvements to the primitive batch processing to reduce memory access, better compression techniques, workload reduction and optimized LPDDR5 access.

Then, we have the highlight of the show, the XDNA 2 NPU, offering up to 55 TOPS alone & that’s big. The NPU is faster than the one featured on the Snapdragon X CPU platform and more than the Intel Lunar Lake platform which AMD expects to end up around 45 TOPS.

AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” APU SKUs & Specs

Alright so with the core IPs out of the way, we can talk about the SKUs. For now, AMD is introducing just two SKUs within its Ryzen AI 300 “Strix” family. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the Ryzen AI 9 365.

Starting with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, we are looking at a 12-core and 24-thread chip that features a four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5C configuration. This chip runs at up to 5.1 GHz boost clocks, offers 36 MB of cache (24 MB L3 + 12 MB L2), and the Radeon 890M iGPU with 16 compute units or 1024 cores. So versus the previous flagship, the Ryzen 9 8945HS, you are getting 50% more cores/threads, 33.3% more compute units, and 3.12x the NPU performance which is great gen-over-gen gains.

AMD says that the XDNA 2 NPU features enhanced AI tiles which enable 2x the multitasking capabilities for increased compute and they are also twice as efficient with specific improvements for GenAI workloads. This leads to the XDNA 2 NPUs being up to 5x faster than last-gen offerings in LLMs. There’s an even higher-end chip, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 which comes with 55 TOPS of NPU AI performance and seems to be limited to just a few laptops such as the HP OmniBook Ultra.

The second chip in the lineup is the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 which is a 10-core and 20-thread part with a boost clock of up to 5.0 GHz, 34 MB of cache, and a Radeon 880M iGPU with a total of 12 compute units or 768 cores. This chip comes with four Zen 5 and six Zen 5C cores. Both Strix APUs pack the same level of NPU capabilities with their XDNA 2 hardware delivering up to 55 TOPS of AI performance.

AMD Ryzen AI “HX” APUs:

As for laptops, the following are all the newest designs that you can get right now:

With the world’s fastest NPU, delivering 55 AI TOPS, AMD can indeed shake things up in the AI PC segment with its Ryzen AI 300 series chips. We can expect more laptops by the time of launch and better availability by the holiday 2024 season.