Rumoured AMD chip is the gaming laptop APU we've been waiting for

pcgamer.com:

Ever wondered why AMD has never made an all-in-one chip like those it engineered for the latest consoles from Microsoft and Sony and stuffed it in a laptop? Wouldn't that pretty sweet? Well, something along those lines is actually happening, allegedly.

The big rumour involves a new APU from AMD codenamed Strix Halo. If anything, it's even better than transplanting a console SoC into a PC laptop. According to Moore's Law is Dead(opens in new tab)—admittedly not always the most reliable of sources—Strix Halo will be the first PC APU with a hefty 256-bit memory bus.

All previous APUs from AMD, and indeed Intel, including AMD's new Ryzen Z1 APU in the Asus RoG Ally(opens in new tab), have made do with a mere 128-bit bus and not a lot of bandwidth to share between the CPU and graphics. We've therefore often wondered why AMD didn't do a console-style APU with a 256-bit bus and therefore the potential for decent graphics performance.

Strix Halo is supposedly that APU. Not only does it have that 256-bit bus, it also reportedly gets no fewer than 40 RDNA 3-plus style graphics compute units. For context, that's a little under half the number of AMD's current Radeon RX 7900 XT desktop monster. It's also more than three times the number of CUs in the Ryzen Z1 Extreme(opens in new tab), which tops out at 12 CUs.

Strix Halo is also said to rock no fewer than 16 CPU cores, though it's not clear if all 16 will be full fat Zen 5 cores or if that number will be split between those and an allocation of Zen 5c low-power cores.

Intriguingly, Strix Halo is said to be a chiplet design, with the graphics contained in its own slice of silicon and further dies for the CPU cores, the I/O, cache, the memory controllers and even dies for an AI