If it runs pytorch at speed without hand holding I would probably get one.
If it runs tinygrad at speed(a lower bar developmentally) I might get one.
Is there a model benchmarking site where you can select varying degrees of models by source code and see how they perform on different hardware. It would assist people to evaluate whether or not a specific piece of hardware is good for the jobs that they want it to do.
> Is there a model benchmarking site where you can select varying degrees of models by source code and see how they perform on different hardware. It would assist people to evaluate whether or not a specific piece of hardware is good for the jobs that they want it to do.
Not that I'm aware of (at least based on real benchmarks), but it's something I've been noodling about building, together with with some other associated data that can be helpful when wanting to select a model. Glad to hear I'm not the only one wanting it :)
100% chance its chewing through at least 50% more power to achieve the result.
Infact based on their TDP guidance, it goes up to 120w, which is more than double M4. But we don't know what the configuration was for this benchmark. We also don't have great numbers for M4's power consumption either.
Then you throw in the fact 120w TDP from AMD is not actually a power consumption figure... and it's all made up.
M4 Max is the most comparable to Strix Halo and while Apple does not appear to give an official power consumption, there are plenty of anecdotal reports of it using over 100W under load. For example:
Not to mention what's the performance like on battery vs. plugged in. If I have to stay tethered to the wall in order to achieve the rated performance then it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison unless you only ever use your laptop at a desk (which is probably most people, honestly).
What is the graph supposed to measure, actually? Renders are usually measured in seconds, so high=worse, but then clearly they highlight it as they're better, so it's the second-difference as a percentage or something?
Why can't companies just include absolute numbers in their comparisons...
It's first party marketing so always orienting the scale towards "higher=better=ours" and measuring via "whatever measurement gave the best numbers to present". They could give all the information in the world and I'd still wait and see what 3rd party reviews say the performance actually is rather than look into the 1st party number.
They should but it’s not favourable. In their presentation they specifically said it outperforms the binned M4 Pro and is on par with the unbinned M4 Pro.
It would be behind the M4 Max. It’s also over double the wattage of the M4 Pro to achieve these numbers.
Even M4 Pro is a big step up. M4 max is pretty expensive and I suspect AMD is targetting a lower price point, not that any prices were mentioned today.
256 bits * DDR5-8533 is a pretty big step up from any other x86-64 laptop or SFF and should be a pretty huge help for anything graphics or bandwidth intensive, like LLMs.
I'd expect laptops with this thing will be available at closer to the Pro (~$2k) than the Max (~$3k). I see a laptop with the 375 for ~$1700 right now, which is more comparable to the 10-core M4. Or in the minipc space, the 370 is ~$1k, which would again be comparable to a 10-core M4 mac mini.
I think the AI appears on any SKU with enough TOPS for copilot+ (they released some 200 SKUs that are just Ryzen 5/7, no AI)
Max is the segment number i.e. it's "Ryzen 11" (the other 300 series SKUs they announced are Ryzen AI [5|7] 3xx). Weirdly though there are no Ryzen 9s so maybe it's really just a rebrand of 9.
The Pro just means it has management and security features for enterprise customers.
Yeah but they had pretty meagre memory bandwidth until now, aside from the parts they made exclusively for Xbox and Playstation. AMD didn't seem to be interested in bringing fast unified memory to real computers until Apple did it. Now they need to double up the bus again to make an M4 Max-alike...
Intel's Knights series of chips (a.k.a. Xeon Phi, a.k.a. Larabee) for servers shipped 8gb of 320gb/s on package memory in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
It "just" doubled the memory bus width from 128 to 256 bit and cranked up the interface clock speed. I wonder what it means for the infinity fabric. Is it going to run at ~4GHz to keep up?
It uses LPDDR5X-8000, with a 256-bit memory interface (double in comparison with standard desktops).
8 GHz x 32 bytes = 256 GB/s
This has been known for a long time.
What annoys me is that AMD does not say whether the Zen 5 cores of Strix Halo have full vector processing pipelines, like Granite Ridge and Fire Range, or they have the narrow pipelines of Strix Point and Krackan Point.
Various leaks have claimed that some products would ship with DDR5-8533 which is 266GB/sec. I wouldn't be surprised if a range of frequencies ship with the 1st gen devices.
Maybe even a SFF sized motherboard that allows CUDIMMs, which is a nice fit since each CUDIMM is 128 bits wide.
> If AMD keeps with tradition, which we fully expect, we will see these monstrous APU chips come to desktop PCs in the future.
How far in the future? I don't need another laptop, but would be nice to have a box to run local llms on. If these things can run LLMs at a decent clip then this would be sort of a "shut up and take my money" situation.
I hope the LLM benchmarks announced were reasonable and not something gross like using a model that doesn't swap on the Strix Halo, but does on a 4090.
HP announced a HP Z2 mini g1a, which is bigger than a NUC, but I believe still considered a SFF:
The strix halo announce was pretty much exactly what was leaked.
However one big surprise was that the Halo 395 chip runs Llama 3.1 70B-Q4 2.2x times faster than a RTX 4090 24GB. Anyone have any details? The slide mentions seeing AMD endnote SHO-14 for details.
It mentioned Q4, but after searching around a bit looks like 70B-Q4 need 35GB or so. So strix halo is 2.2x faster than a 4090 when it's paging to system ram.
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If it runs tinygrad at speed(a lower bar developmentally) I might get one.
Is there a model benchmarking site where you can select varying degrees of models by source code and see how they perform on different hardware. It would assist people to evaluate whether or not a specific piece of hardware is good for the jobs that they want it to do.
Not that I'm aware of (at least based on real benchmarks), but it's something I've been noodling about building, together with with some other associated data that can be helpful when wanting to select a model. Glad to hear I'm not the only one wanting it :)
Deleted Comment
https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/3d-...
100% chance its chewing through at least 50% more power to achieve the result.
Infact based on their TDP guidance, it goes up to 120w, which is more than double M4. But we don't know what the configuration was for this benchmark. We also don't have great numbers for M4's power consumption either.
Then you throw in the fact 120w TDP from AMD is not actually a power consumption figure... and it's all made up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1hj3m0p/m4_max_...
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m4-max-eats-battery.244...
M4 is likely more power efficient, but not 2x.
Non-thumbnail version of the chart: https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/3d-...
Why can't companies just include absolute numbers in their comparisons...
It would be behind the M4 Max. It’s also over double the wattage of the M4 Pro to achieve these numbers.
256 bits * DDR5-8533 is a pretty big step up from any other x86-64 laptop or SFF and should be a pretty huge help for anything graphics or bandwidth intensive, like LLMs.
Gosh that name is a mouthful
"AI" seems to have replaced the segment number.
The + is because it's the top-end model of the lineup.
Not sure what's Max or Pro about it though.
Max is the segment number i.e. it's "Ryzen 11" (the other 300 series SKUs they announced are Ryzen AI [5|7] 3xx). Weirdly though there are no Ryzen 9s so maybe it's really just a rebrand of 9.
The Pro just means it has management and security features for enterprise customers.
Secure processor, shadow stacks, secure boot, hardware asset trackability. Enterprise stuff.
That was the good part, lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strix_(mythology)#Greek_origin...
Bandwidth is more or less on par with the M4 Pro, and it supports up to 128GB.
Zen 5 CPU, RDNA 3.5 GPU, and XDNA 2 NPU. No word on process nodes.
8 GHz x 32 bytes = 256 GB/s
This has been known for a long time.
What annoys me is that AMD does not say whether the Zen 5 cores of Strix Halo have full vector processing pipelines, like Granite Ridge and Fire Range, or they have the narrow pipelines of Strix Point and Krackan Point.
Maybe even a SFF sized motherboard that allows CUDIMMs, which is a nice fit since each CUDIMM is 128 bits wide.
How far in the future? I don't need another laptop, but would be nice to have a box to run local llms on. If these things can run LLMs at a decent clip then this would be sort of a "shut up and take my money" situation.
HP announced a HP Z2 mini g1a, which is bigger than a NUC, but I believe still considered a SFF:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2567865/hp-z2-mini-g1a-packs...
EDIT: Oh, I see they're calling the laptop a workstation.
[1] https://liliputing.com/hp-zbook-ultra-14-g1a-mobile-workstat...
However one big surprise was that the Halo 395 chip runs Llama 3.1 70B-Q4 2.2x times faster than a RTX 4090 24GB. Anyone have any details? The slide mentions seeing AMD endnote SHO-14 for details.
Maybe 70B-Q4 doesn't fit in 24GB?
Not so impressive 8-(.