AMD Ryzen 8050 Strix Point APUs With XDNA 2 NPU Coming In 2024, Boosts AI Performance By 3X

AMD's next-gen Strix Point "Ryzen 8050" APUs will feature a major improvement to their AI capabilities with the XDNA 2 engine coming in 2024.

While AMD is refreshing its APU lineup with the Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" family, the company will also be introducing its true next-gen APU lineup under the Ryzen 8050 series in 2024. During the Advancing AI event, AMD confirmed that the lineup will host some major improvements across the board.

Besides offering the latest Zen 5 CPU and RDNA 3.5 GPU core architectures, the AMD Ryzen 8050 "Strix Point" APUs are proposed to offer a 3x improvement in Generative AI capabilities. To help achieve this level of performance, the Strix Point APUs will embed the latest XDNA 2 NPUs & a far more robust Ryzen AI software suite.

Considering that AMD's Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" APUs offer up to 16 TOPs of performance, a 3x improvement with Ryzen 8050 "Strix Point" APUs means that we are looking at up to 48 TOPs of AI performance. That's almost 50 TOPs which will mark an impressive achievement for AMD's AI and NPU capabilities.

The actual successor to the AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" APUs will be Strix Point and Strix Point Halo, both of which will fall under the Ryzen 8050 APU family. These laptop chips will be separated into two segments since the Strix Point chips will offer a monolithic design with a mix of Zen 5C and Zen 5D cores while the higher-end Strix Halo chips will feature a chiplet design with the Zen 5C cores alone.

AMD Ryzen 8050 Strix Point Mono Expected Features:

Zen 5 (4nm) Monolithic Design

Up To 12 Cores In Hybrid Config (Zen 5 + Zen 5C)

32 MB of Shared L3 cache

35% Faster CPU Versus Phoenix at 50W

16 RDNA 3+ Compute Units

On Par With RTX 3050 Max-Q

128-bit LPDDR5X Memory Controller

XDNA 2 Engine Integrated

~25 TOPS AI Engine

2H 2024 Launch (Expected)

AMD Ryzen 8050 Strix Point Halo Expected Features:

Zen 5 Chiplet Design

Up To 16 Cores

64 MB of Shared L3 cache

25% Faster CPU Versus 16-Core Dragon Range at 90W

40 RDNA 3+ Compute Units

On Par With RTX 4070 Max-Q (90W)

256-bit LPDDR5X Memory Controler

XDNA 2 Engine Integrated

~50 TOPS AI Engine

2H 2024 Launch (Expected)

The AMD Strix Point APUs are expected to launch in the second half of 2024 with the first APU shipments to OEMs commencing next year. This will be around the same time Intel will be offering its Arrow Lake CPUs, the follow-up to Meteor Lake.

While Intel hasn't publicly disclosed the AI processing (TOPS) capability of its 1st Gen Core Ultra CPUs, they're also making a big deal out of the VPU which is a dedicated AI engine block on the upcoming chips that are launching next week. So it will be interesting to see how things go as AI will be a major PC driving force in 2024 with the likes of AMD, Apple, Intel & Qualcomm competing in the same space against each other.