AMD has seemingly just inadvertently confirmed the existence of a CPU that’s rumored to give you more gaming power than a PlayStation 5 without needing a graphics card. In fact, in terms of core specs, you could think of this new CPU, codenamed AMD Strix Halo, as being an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and a Radeon RX 7600 in one single chip. Not only that, but the GPU maybe even more powerful than that. If this is true, then mini PCs that can genuinely handle the demands of PC gaming are on the cards, as are some killer gaming laptops.
If all the current speculation is true, then this AMD Strix Halo CPU would be very likely to end up on our best gaming CPU guide. AMD calls its processors with decent integrated Radeon GPUs accelerated processing units, or APUs, and the company recently claimed its new Ryzen 7 8700G could hit 63fps in Cyberpunk 2077 using just its integrated GPU.
However, the 8700G could only manage this using low settings. If the rumors about Strix Halo are true, then we could be looking at a seriously powerful CPU and GPU in one package.
According to tech gossip YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead, Strix Halo is set to have 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units, and if these follow the same structure as the RDNA 3 compute units found in AMD’s latest GPUs, we’re looking at a total of 2,560 stream processors inside this CPU. That’s massive.
To put this figure into perspective, the Radeon RX 7600 only has 2,048 stream processors, and is plenty capable of gaming at 1080p with decent graphics settings. Meanwhile, the last-gen RDNA 2 GPU in the PlayStation 5 has 36 compute units, making for 2,304 stream processors.
The new AMD Halo Strix CPU is also rumored to be kitted with 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, making it much more powerful than any of AMD’s APUs to date, in terms of both CPU and GPU power. The rumors about Strix Halo have been floating around for a few weeks now, but what’s interesting is that AMD has just confirmed its existence, even if it hasn’t revealed any of the specs.
The confirmation was spotted by X (formerly Twitter) user Kepler_L2, who pointed to this GitHub entry for AMD’s ROCm software stack, which offers programming tools, compilers, libraries and so on for AMD GPUs. The entry details two chips codenamed Strix Point and Strix Halo, associated with the model numbers “gfx1150” and “gfx1151”.
This launch looks like it’s a fair way off in the future, though, with Moore’s Law is Dead saying it won’t be here until 2025. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a decent gaming CPU, check out our AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D review. This processor doesn’t have decent integrated gaming graphics, but it offers loads of gaming power on the CPU front.