GoKawiilAMD 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.
With Strix Halo, you could pack up to 128GB of unified memory, but AMD is pushing that boundary higher with Gorgon Halo; perhaps at the worst possible time, as global DRAM shortages continue to push prices up across all business categories. It’ll be a minor miracle if AMD is able to actually ship Gorgon Point with 192GB of unified memory consistently — we’ve seen Apple remove the 512GB option and even the 128GB option from the Mac Studio due to memory shortages.
Regardless, AMD has a lineup of three chips that should look very familiar if you’ve looked over the Strix Halo stack. All three chips use Zen 5 CPU cores and RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, alongside an XDNA 2 NPU. The flagship Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 comes with a minor clock speed bump of 100 MHz over the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, allowing it to boost to 5.2 GHz. Otherwise, you could scratch off the “4” and replace it with a “3,” at least based on the specs AMD has shared so far.
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Swipe to scroll horizontally Row 0 - Cell 0 Cores / Threads Arch (CPU / GPU) Boost Clock Total Cache NPU TOPS iGPU (CUs) Unified memory (GPU memory) Max+ Pro 495 16 / 32 Zen 5 / RDNA 3.5 5.2 GHz 80 MB 55 Radeon 8065S (40) Up to 192 GB (160 GB) Max Pro 490 12 / 24 Zen 5 / RDNA 3.5 5 GHz 76 MB 50 Radeon 8050S (32) Up to 192 GB (160 GB) Max Pro 485 8 / 16 Zen 5 / RDNA 3.5 5 GHz 40 MB 50 Radeon 8050S (32) Up to 192 GB (160 GB)
These chips currently have a “Pro” tag, which means they’re targeting the commercial market. However, the slides below refer to the Ryzen AI Max 400 range more broadly. I asked AMD about this discrepancy, and a spokesperson sent the following: “AMD will be announcing the Ryzen AI Max PRO 400 Series, featuring AMD PRO technologies which deliver enterprise-grade security, manageability, and reliability.”
So, I guess consumer Gorgon Halo is still up in the air. Maybe.
Interestingly, AMD opted to stick with a GPU with 32 CUs (the Radeon 8050S) for the Ryzen AI Max Pro 490 and 485. Earlier this year, AMD refreshed the Ryzen AI Max 385 and 390 with 40 CUs, the same as the flagship, in the form of the Ryzen AI Max+ 388 and 392. Maybe we’ll see a refresh of the refreshed Gorgon Halo chips with 40 CUs down the line.
Image 1 of 4 (Image credit: AMD) (Image credit: AMD) (Image credit: AMD) (Image credit: AMD)
Memory is the big upgrade here. Regardless of the GPU configuration, up to 160GB of unified memory can function as VRAM (32GB is reserved for the system). AMD says that much memory makes Ryzen AI Max 400 chips the first x86 client processors able to run a 300B+ parameter LLM. It wins in a category of one, however: Intel doesn’t make a large SoC like Gorgon Halo, and Apple uses the ARM ISA.
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