The AMD Strix Halo Radeon 8050S and 8060S iGPUs appear to have promising, although confusing, performance.
Without a doubt, AMD enthusiasts are eager to see what performance enhancements Strix Halo is prepared to offer. Strix Halo will eliminate the tiny cores for a Zen 5 “only” design, enabling far higher multicore performance than Strix Point, which uses a combination of Zen 5c and full-fat Zen 5 cores. Furthermore, it is generally anticipated that Strix Halo will have large iGPUs that will outperform entry-level and even some mid-range mobile GPUs, enabling Strix Halo systems to do away with the need for discrete graphics entirely. The upcoming ROG Flow Z13 tablet is a perfect example of this.
Recent sources indicate that the next Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 APU, which is expected to be marketed as the Radeon 8060S, would feature an RDNA 3.5-based iGPU with an astounding 40 CUs. The Radeon 8060S outperformed the RTX 4060 Laptop dGPU in a leaked Geekbench Vulkan benchmark. However, the Radeon 8060S and the 32-CU 8050S scored 16,454 and 16,663 respectively, according to another leaked test, Passmark. No, that isn’t a typo. It is evident that the numbers are far from final because the 8060S with 40 CUs is just slightly slower than the 8050S with 32 CUs. However, in this range of performance, the Strix Halo APUs are about on par with the RTX 3080 laptop GPU and far behind the RTX 4070 laptop GPU. Not bad for an iGPU, but given the unusually little difference between the 8050S and the 8060S, it is quite likely that the retail units’ actual performance will be higher.
