In August, an Asus thermal engineer goofed by revealing the existence of possibly the most powerful tablet PC ever made — an Asus ROG Flow Z13 powered by an unannounced AMD “Strix Halo” chip, one boasting an incredible 80 watts of power for its GPU alone.
Now, VideoCardz is reporting that the chip (and tablet) are about to become official at CES 2025 next month — as the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 Plus, a Zen 5 processor with Radeon 8060S graphics.
With 16 Zen 5 processor cores and an impressive 40 compute units worth of AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics, VideoCardz points out that it should be AMD’s fastest portable chip ever made — far outstripping previous chips in the graphics department in particular. (The Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 had just 16 GPU compute units — this is 2.5 times as many.)
The leaks suggest that not all AI Max / Strix Halo chips will be equal; variants tipped as the AI Max 390, AI Max 385, and AI Max 380 are expected to have as few as six CPU cores and as few as 16 RDNA graphics compute units. But online retailer leaks show the Asus tablet should offer the two highest-end parts with 40 compute units.
Otherwise, the early Asus ROG Flow Z13 leaks describe a tablet running Windows 11 on a 13.4-inch, 180Hz IPS touchscreen display, at a 16:10 aspect ratio, with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of storage.
I’m excited for what a huge leap in laptop/tablet graphics might unlock. It wasn’t that long ago that a new wave of AMD integrated graphics paved the way for the handheld PC gaming revolution.
VideoCardz writes that AMD is “set to announce” the new AI Max Plus series at CES.