AMD Ryzen AI Max 400 ‘Gorgon Halo’ packs up to 192GB of unified memory — refreshed APU uses Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5, and can clock up to 5.2 GHz

News
By
Published

They’ll show up in Ryzen AI Halo boxes “soon,” and pre-orders for Ryzen AI Halo with Strix Halo open in June, starting at $3,999.

A Ryzen AI Max chip.
(Image credit: AMD)
17

AMD is refreshing its stack of large SoCs, dubbed Ryzen AI Max, with new Gorgon Point chips. Codenamed Gorgon Halo, the Ryzen AI Max 400 range is a minor refresh to the Ryzen AI Max 300 ‘Strix Halo’ chips already available, similar to what we saw with Gorgon Point in laptops earlier this year. Gorgon Halo comes with one significant difference, however, which is space for up to 192GB of unified memory.

Latest Videos FromTom's Hardware
Jake Roach
Jake Roach
Senior Analyst, CPUs

Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.

17 Comments Comment from the forums
  • usertests
    Thanks for including the full presentation.

    If Strix Halo (300 series) can't be paired with 192 GB, then that is likely an artificial limitation. That seems like it wouldn't matter, and it probably doesn't, but the chips are produced and sold without any memory. And they should be identical silicon to Gorgon Halo.

    The amounts you can set as VRAM also seem arbitrary, although I think it can be overridden.

    The AMD 395 box is late and more expensive than others, as pointed out by VideoCardz.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    This is one of the more disappointing refreshes of late. Only the top SKU gets a clock speed boost and the others seemingly just get higher capacity DRAM support which is undoubtedly a chosen restriction rather than technical one. They're also changing the name of the top GPU configuration and the only difference appears to be +100MHz clock speed.
    Reply
  • vinay2070
    Seems like with memory prices going through the roof, 192GB for that caliber GPU feels like a waste.
    Reply
  • usertests
    thestryker said:
    This is one of the more disappointing refreshes of late. Only the top SKU gets a clock speed boost and the others seemingly just get higher capacity DRAM support which is undoubtedly a chosen restriction rather than technical one. They're also changing the name of the top GPU configuration and the only difference appears to be +100MHz clock speed.
    Refreshes are hardly ever interesting. Swapping in a new chiplet while keeping others the same could make future refreshes interesting, but AMD has never done that AFAIK. And sometimes the lineup can be repaired. For example, Intel's 250K is interesting since it offered a 6P + 12E configuration not seen before, on top of the massive +900 MHz die-to-die clock boost.

    AMD arguably made things worse with its refreshes this year, particularly the Ryzen AI 7 445 including 2 full cores instead of 3, and a measly 8 MiB of L3 cache. Making that part inferior to the Ryzen AI 5 340.

    vinay2070 said:
    Seems like with memory prices going through the roof, 192GB for that caliber GPU feels like a waste.
    It's all about AI until prices drop, and I think some people will make the case that 192 GB can be useful even at this level of performance. Probably for mixture of experts (MoE) models. Will it be worth what I assume will be $4,000 to $6,000 pricing? Yes... again for "some people". But I think it could be seriously challenged by multiple DGX Sparks connected using 200 GbE ports, which all of the AMD Halo boxes have lacked.

    When memory $/GB eventually drops back to and below mid-2025 levels, then that pairing could be a no-brainer. I have 64 GB DDR4 in a far weaker system, because it was cheap. I think we'll see $1/GB or less DDR6 or contemporary equivalents within 10-15 years, making 256 GB to 1 TB memory affordable.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    usertests said:
    AMD arguably made things worse with its refreshes this year, particularly the Ryzen AI 7 445 including 2 full cores instead of 3, and a measly 8 MiB of L3 cache. Making that part inferior to the Ryzen AI 5 340.
    Yeah there have been some weird choices with AMD's 400 refreshes in general.
    usertests said:
    Refreshes are hardly ever interesting.
    I certainly agree, but two of the three processors here are literally the same as what they're "replacing".
    Reply
  • gaspoweredcat
    And here I was finally about to cave and get an evo-x2 but I'll hold out for the extra memory
    Reply
  • vinay2070
    usertests said:
    I think we'll see $1/GB or less DDR6 or contemporary equivalents within 10-15 years, making 256 GB to 1 TB memory affordable.
    If at all we have not lost jobs to AI by then and can afford to have some spare with the UBI.
    Reply
  • usertests
    vinay2070 said:
    If at all we have not lost jobs to AI by then and can afford to have some spare with the UBI.
    Learn to code service your alien overlords.
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    And remember kids, all this can be yours for the price of your soul and a load of pain.
    Reply
  • ottonis
    Combining a large amount of unified RAM ( 192 GB) with a lackluster performance of the integrated GPU just does not make lot of sense,
    Alex Ziskind has shown numerous times that similar concepts from Apple (Mac Studio M4) or nVidia (Spark) leave the Strix Halo platform in the dust when it comes to various AI compute tasks across a wide variety of large LLMs. And the announced Apple Studio M5 will only further increase the gap.
    AMD should have massively ramped up their iGPU, but instead they leave it at 32 CUs. Where is the logic behind this? Who is going to buy such a machine when they can get an Apple system that is just magnitude of orders faster and will provide same or more unified RAM?
    Reply