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AMD’s next-gen APU may trail behind the RX 6600

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AMD's CEO delivering the Computex 2024 presentation.
AMD

AMD’s next-gen APU lineup, dubbed Strix Halo, is right around the corner — but for now, all we can rely on are leaks when it comes to information about these processing units. Today, a leaked Geekbench test gave us some insight into the graphics performance of one of the upcoming top processors. While the integrated GPU sports more cores, it failed to beat the aging RX 6600, and actually trailed behind by a significant margin.

Brace yourself, because the APU in question has a name that you’ll need to write down. In the Geekbench test, the chip is referred to as AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 w/ Radeon 8060S. The actual product name will likely omit the mention of the GPU, but even just the first part is quite a mouthful. AMD also drops the “9” that you’d usually expect to see in a flagship processor, such as the Ryzen 9 9900X.

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Although it’s the APU that’s being tested, we’re seeing GPU performance in the Vulkan test. The 8060S scored 67,004 points, which is significantly less than many budget discrete graphics cards, such as the RX 6600 or the RX 7600. It’s on par with the RX 6500 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 3050.

A benchmark of the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395.
Geekbench

The Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 delivers a solid set of specs, including 16 Zen 5 cores and a boost clock that might reach as high as 5.1GHz, as well as up to 64MB of cache. This new lineup doesn’t usher in AMD’s RDNA 4 generation of graphics, though, and it instead sticks to RDNA 3.5, which was also used in the last-gen Strix Point lineup.

The Radeon 8060S comes decked out with 40 compute units (CUs), which is much more than the RX 6600 (28 CUs). However, even with two generations between them, the benchmark shows that an APU may not quite be able to rival discrete graphics. That’s not necessarily bad news for AMD.

The “Pro” moniker implies that this Ryzen AI offering is going to be a workstation APU first and foremost, which means that graphics performance may not be the most important thing. Being part of an APU, the Radeon 8060S GPU is quite limited both in the form factor and the power consumption, so it’s hard to expect comparable performance. Besides, this is just one benchmark — we’ll have to see it in action to truly judge how well it stacks up against its discrete counterparts.

AMD is said to announce Strix Halo, alongside RDNA 4, at CES 2025 in January, with product availability expected for the second half of the year.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
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