There’s a lot of hype surrounding AMD’s next-generation laptop CPU design, Strix Halo. It’s set to follow the equally highly anticipated Strix Point chips, which are arriving as the Ryzen AI 300 series in laptops later this month, but is expected it include a big leap in GPU power. As such, today’s leak of the first AMD Strix Halo benchmark should be cause for excitement, but ultimately leaves us still with plenty of questions.
The story so far with AMD Strix Halo is that it’s a CPU design with a powerful integrated GPU that’s set to find its way into the best gaming laptop designs of the future – with the launch expected to occur as early as CES 2025 in January next year. We’ve seen from previous leaks, concerning the AMD Strix Halo GPU and AMD Strix Halo diagram, that the chip is expected to be powerful, but this new leak is the first to include benchmark data.
The AMD Strix Halo benchmark data comes via that serial source of benchmark leaks, Geekbench. Because this benchmarking software includes a feature that uploads test results to a website, we regularly see new hardware appear first on this platform, as those with early access to the hardware put it through its paces and unwittingly share the results with the world.
The leak this time was spotted by X (formerly Twitter) user @Benchleaks, and shows a product named AMD Eng Sample: 100-000001422-31_N, which fellow X user and regular tech leaker @9950pro claims is an “STX Halo” chip. The listing notes that the chip has eight CPU cores running at a massive 5.36GHz clock speed, plus it’s equipped with 32MB of L3 cache. If true, the clock speed here would be notably higher than that of current-gen AMD laptop CPUs.
Previous rumors have suggested Strix Halo will be available in configurations of between six and 16 cores, with the number of GPU compute units (CUs) rising to as high as 40 CUs. This leak doesn’t, though, list any details about the GPU.
As to the benchmark scores themselves, they paint a varied picture. There are two different test runs, with one having the single-core score being record-breakingly fast, but the multi-core score is quite low. Then there’s another run with a lower single-core score but a very fast multi-core score.
It’s also notable that the data is being run on Linux rather than Windows, and there are no details about the chip’s power settings. As such, it’s all very speculative at the moment, but these high numbers do broadly point to the hype surrounding the chip being justified.
For more concrete information on upcoming AMD CPUs, check out our Zen 5 guide, which includes everything we know so far about the company’s new Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 chips.