AMD Ryzen AI 300 MAX series APU support spotted in latest chipset driver from Asus

It seems that AMD’s newest chipset drivers are now available, and courtesy of hardware leaker HXL, the release notes mention support for the “Ryzen AI 300 MAX” line-up. This finding was sourced from ASUS, who has the latest drivers available to download for its X670E series of motherboards. The gist is that AMD has seemingly confirmed the existence of the Ryzen AI 300 MAX series, whose rumored codename is Strix Halo.

The source of the confirmation comes via a chipset driver download from Asus, and is located in the Chipset folder on page 3 of ReleaseNotes_6.10.02.1849.rtf.

Strix Halo is AMD’s yet-to-launch flagship mainstream APU offering. The top configuration allegedly packs 16 Zen 5 cores at 5.8GHz and a 40 CU-equipped iGPU based on RDNA 3.5. This beast is designed for workstations and premium top-of-the-line laptops and is expected to consume nearly 130W of power.

A previous leak gave us some insight regarding the internals of this chip, based on which Strix Halo contains three chiplets; two CCDs and one large SoC die. The SoC die packs a massive 40 CU iGPU clocked at 3 GHz, eclipsing the RX 7600 XT, 32MB of MALL (Memory Access at Last Level) cache which we assume will work similarly to Infinity Cache and may also be usable by the CPU cores as a possible L4 cache. Surrounding the package, we have eight LPPDR5X-8533 memory modules possibly indicating a 256-bit memory interface in the SoC die. On the I/O and expansion side, Strix Halo is rumored to have four PCIe 5.0 and eight PCIe 4.0 lanes alongside two USB 4.0 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports each.

To satisfy Microsoft’s AI PC requirements, AMD will leverage its XDNA2 architecture for Strix Halo’s NPU. Given the larger die size, the NPU TOPS might be slightly higher than what Strix can currently push.

Strix Halo is an ambitious project by AMD and may render many discrete mobile GPUs obsolete. AMD has already made strides in the iGPU segment with its Radeon 600/700/800M offerings. The looming question is pricing since Strix Halo will not only be more expensive to make, but we must also factor in the cost of packaging. In any case, we expect AMD to unveil the Ryzen AI 300 MAX series at CES 2025.