AMD launches killer new 12-core Zen 5 APU for laptops and handhelds

AMD's next-gen Strix Point APU for laptops and, we assume, gaming handhelds has been rumoured for so long it's taken on an almost mythical quality. But thanks to the Computex 2024 tech show, it's here at last and looks like an absolute beast, with more CPU cores, more GPU compute units, a much more powerful NPU, the whole works.

The first laptops with the new APU go on sale in July and guess what? Yup, the rumoured «Ryzen AI» branding is true. The new chip will be known as the Ryzen AI 300 Series. Indeed, the rumour that AMD changed the branding from Ryzen AI 100 to Ryzen AI 300 at the last minute is also true. Some elements of the marketing materials hadn't been fully updated and «Ryzen AI 100 Series» remains stencilled onto at least one of the images of the chip. Whoops.

But enough pre-launch trivia, what makes Strix Pont tick? First up, it combines both Zen 5 and Zen 5C cores. You can read more about AMD's new CPU design in Nick's article about the new Ryzen 9000 desktop chips, which AMD is also launching today. But AMD is claiming 16% average IPC gains, which is a decent generational uptick.

Clock speeds are comparable to previous APUs but what isn't is the core counts. Where the old 7000-series Phoenix and 8000-series Hawk Point APUs—as seen in various laptops and gaming handhelds—had up to eight CPU cores, Strix Point packs four Zen 5 cores and up to eight Zen 5C cores.

Zen 5C, in case you were wondering, is AMD's compact CPU core but has exactly the same execution units as Zen 5, just less cache. The consequence is that a block of Zen 5C cores taken up significantly less space than the equivalent number of fully cached Zen 5 cores. For some software, like media encoding, Zen 5C will be pretty much as fast as Zen 5. For gaming, the extra cache in Zen 5 makes a noticeable difference.

That, of course, will mean some careful thread scheduling will be required to ensure that critical game threads are prioritised for those Zen 5 cores. But this is nothing new. AMD