The powerful APU at least has a fight with the RTX 4070 laptop GPU

AMD's upcoming Strix Halo APU has received some more details ahead of its CES 2025 reveal. A teaser render of the new Strix Halo APU is available below:

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The latest information on AMD's upcoming Strix Halo comes from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, with a full leak on the details inside the Strix Halo APU. We can expect 16 cores with Zen 5 processing power, a whopping 40 CUs of RDNA 3.5 GPU power, a larger TDP of 120W, and support for LPDDR5X-8533 memory. MLID says the flagship “at least” packs a punch with NVIDIA's current-gen GeForce RTX 4070 laptop GPU.

We can expect 32GB and 64GB models to launch in the first half of 2025, with the flagship 128GB models launching in the second half of 2025. AMD is expected to unveil Strirx Halo at CES 2025, with MLID adding that workstation models will launch in the first quarter of 2025. Strix Halo APU-powered gaming laptops aren't expected until the second quarter of 2024.

If AMD sees strong Strix Halo sales, MLID says AMD “could push for SFF as well,” which would be great to see: the huge revival of the SFF gaming PC movement with the Strix Point APU.

AMD already has its Ryzen AI 300 series “Strix Point” APUs on the market, but they’re nowhere near as beefy as the updated Strix Halo APU. First of all, Strix Point reaches a maximum of 12 cores and 24 threads, Strix Halo expands that to 16 cores and 32 threads.

There is only 24MB of L3 cache on the Strix Point, compared to the massive 64MB of L3 cache on the Strix Halo, while there is also 32MB of MALL cache on the Strix Halo, which is not present on the Strix Point. We also got a huge memory bus upgrade, with a 128-bit memory bus on the Strix Point compared to doubling to 256-bit on the Strix Halo.

However, the big upgrade comes in the 40 CUs of RDNA 3.5 GPU in the Strix Halo, a gigantic upgrade over the 16 CUs of RDNA 3.5 GPU in the Strix Point. Now here we expect the performance of an RTX 4070 laptop GPU, all from an APU that consumes a TDP of 120W.

AMD is expected to unveil Strix Halo at CES 2025. We will see Strix Halo APU-based gaming laptops by the second quarter of 2025 at the latest. We recently heard that NVIDIA's next-generation GeForce RTX 50-series laptop GPUs will be built into new gaming laptops in 2025 with older-generation 13th and 14th-generation Intel Core CPUs, as well as AMD's Zen 4 CPUs previous generation.

I wonder how much of the sub-$1,500 gaming laptop market AMD can capture with Strix Halo in 2025…