I would love to try out one of the mini-PCs that ship this, but they seem to be made of either platinum (hugely overpriced in EU) or unobtainium (no retailers carry them here, and getting something direct from China is dicey warranty-wise). ROCm 7 looks to be working already under most Linux distros and having this as a workstation with a local LLM or a “home inference server” with Ollama and a few services seems like a great solution.
Comparing this against mobile dGPUs and the (finally real) DGX Spark, this feels like a latent market segment that has not arrived at its final form. I don't know what delayed the DGX Spark so long, but it granted AMD a huge boon by allowing them capture some market mindshare first.
Compared to discrete GPUs (mobile or not), the advantage of a dGPU is memory bandwidth. The disadvantage of a dGPU is power draw and memory capacity—if we set aside CUDA, which I grant is a HUGE thing to just "set aside".
If we mix in the small DGX Spark desktops, then those have an additional advantage in the dual 200Gb network ports that allow for RDMA across multiple boxes. One could get more from of a small stack (2, 3 or 4) of those than from the same number of Strix Halo 395 boxes. However, as sexy as my homelab-brain finds a small stack of DGX Spark boxes with RDMA, I would think that for professional use, I would rather have a GPU server (or Threadripper GPU workstation) than four DGX Spark boxes?
Because the DGX Spark isn't being sold in a laptop (AFAIK, CMIIW), that is another differentiator in favor of the Strix Halo. Once again, it points to this being a weird, emerging market segment, and I expect the next generation or two will iterate towards how these capabilities really ought to be packaged.
“dGPU” usually means “discrete GPU”. Do you mean “iGPU” for “integrated GPU” instead?
Strix Halo is also being marketed for gaming but the performance profile is all wrong for that. The CPU is too fast and the iGPU still not strong enough.
Yes, I intended to use the term "discrete GPU" before using "dGPU" as a shorthand for that exact reason (in the second paragraph). I now see that I edited the first paragraph to use "dGPU" without first defining it as such.
I also agree that they aren't for gaming (something I know little about). My comment was with respect to compute workloads, but I never specified that. Apologies.
As a casual gamer I'm already okay with the RTX 3050 dGPU on my laptop. Reports put Strix Halo at RTX 4070 level which is massive for an iGPU and certainly allows for 2k single screen gaming. Hardcore gaming will always require a desktop with PCIe boards.
I wonder if higher TDP is possible with framework desktop. That one probably has much better cooling than these laptops with the same chip and if numbers are different.
The saddest part of this is the lack of availability: at this point there's 2 standard laptops using this chip, the Z13 being the only high perf one. There's the Framework lines as well, but they aren't available in many countries, and it's a very specific public.
And that's after half a year after the first machines to come to the market.
I love the Z13, but it's clearly a niche machine, so I'm assuming they are having a really hard time manufacturing the chips ? All the capacity is getting eaten by Apple ?
Cognisant US pricing for the HP Z Book Ultra was astronomical, within the EU it's on par with standard laptops and to good effect. The only regret I have is ordering on release day and not wanting to wait for the 128gb version; but battery life and power has remain unmatched to any of the pretty large workloads I have thrown at it!
Outside of laptops, Beelink and co. are making NUCs with them which are relatively affordable!
I do agree, the scarcity has limited their opportunity to assess the growth opportunity.
Power draw is around 75W. It can be manual boosted, but will stay below 100W under all circumstances (from memory, as I was researching the Z13)
The chip itself should accept higher power draws, and ASUS usually isn't shy on feeding 130+W to a laptop, so the 75W figure was quite a surprise to me.
I read somewhere, but can't remember where, that a major reason those APUs aren't as efficient as the Apple ones is a conscious decision to share the architecture with Epyc and therefore accept worse efficiency at lower wattage as a tradeoff.
In this review, Hardware Canucks tested [1] the M4 Pro (3nm 2nd gen) and the 395+ (4nm) at 50w and found the performance being somewhat comparable. The differences can be explained away by 3nm vs 4nm.
They are ok but yeah they do not have anything like the memory bandwidth of an m3 ultra. But they also cost a lot less. I’m primarily looking to replace my older desktop but just have to make sure i can run an external gpu like the A6000 that i can borrow from work without having to spend a week fiddling with settings or parameters
I love the concept of it and have been thinking about getting one the only problem I see right now is no ability as far as I can see to get an external dock to run an additional external gpu in the future.
> In a Linux context I got some GPUs working and I can add some [external] GPU devices. Minis forum when I reached out to them said they don't officially support either via the Thunderbolt compatibility USB 4, USB4 v2 or even the built-in PCIe slot. Yeah, not technically officially supported and it's because of the resource allocation and the BAR space and they need somebody on the BIOS team to understand that to fix it.
There are ways to manage BAR better in linux or with UEFI preboot environments for windows as hobbyists have been doing for ages due to bad BIOS support https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI
I was just thinking the other day that AMD can match Nvidia pound for pound on the raw hardware specs, and if they don’t just yet, they get pretty close. If AI is a bubble, then AMD should not catch up. If there isn’t a bubble, then there is no choice but to learn to use whatever is out there and AMD is truly set to be another trillion dollar company. The 10% stake OpenAI took is going to look like a Google buying YouTube moment in the long run.
And it’s worth noting, AMD has always matched up with Nvidia hardware wise for decades, plus or minus. They are an interesting company in that they took on both Nvidia and Intel, and is still continuing to do so.
I would love to try out one of the mini-PCs that ship this, but they seem to be made of either platinum (hugely overpriced in EU) or unobtainium (no retailers carry them here, and getting something direct from China is dicey warranty-wise). ROCm 7 looks to be working already under most Linux distros and having this as a workstation with a local LLM or a “home inference server” with Ollama and a few services seems like a great solution.
Comparing this against mobile dGPUs and the (finally real) DGX Spark, this feels like a latent market segment that has not arrived at its final form. I don't know what delayed the DGX Spark so long, but it granted AMD a huge boon by allowing them capture some market mindshare first.
Compared to discrete GPUs (mobile or not), the advantage of a dGPU is memory bandwidth. The disadvantage of a dGPU is power draw and memory capacity—if we set aside CUDA, which I grant is a HUGE thing to just "set aside".
If we mix in the small DGX Spark desktops, then those have an additional advantage in the dual 200Gb network ports that allow for RDMA across multiple boxes. One could get more from of a small stack (2, 3 or 4) of those than from the same number of Strix Halo 395 boxes. However, as sexy as my homelab-brain finds a small stack of DGX Spark boxes with RDMA, I would think that for professional use, I would rather have a GPU server (or Threadripper GPU workstation) than four DGX Spark boxes?
Because the DGX Spark isn't being sold in a laptop (AFAIK, CMIIW), that is another differentiator in favor of the Strix Halo. Once again, it points to this being a weird, emerging market segment, and I expect the next generation or two will iterate towards how these capabilities really ought to be packaged.
“dGPU” usually means “discrete GPU”. Do you mean “iGPU” for “integrated GPU” instead?
Strix Halo is also being marketed for gaming but the performance profile is all wrong for that. The CPU is too fast and the iGPU still not strong enough.
I am sure it’s amazing at matmul though.
Yes, I intended to use the term "discrete GPU" before using "dGPU" as a shorthand for that exact reason (in the second paragraph). I now see that I edited the first paragraph to use "dGPU" without first defining it as such.
I also agree that they aren't for gaming (something I know little about). My comment was with respect to compute workloads, but I never specified that. Apologies.
As a casual gamer I'm already okay with the RTX 3050 dGPU on my laptop. Reports put Strix Halo at RTX 4070 level which is massive for an iGPU and certainly allows for 2k single screen gaming. Hardcore gaming will always require a desktop with PCIe boards.
I wonder if higher TDP is possible with framework desktop. That one probably has much better cooling than these laptops with the same chip and if numbers are different.
The saddest part of this is the lack of availability: at this point there's 2 standard laptops using this chip, the Z13 being the only high perf one. There's the Framework lines as well, but they aren't available in many countries, and it's a very specific public.
And that's after half a year after the first machines to come to the market.
I love the Z13, but it's clearly a niche machine, so I'm assuming they are having a really hard time manufacturing the chips ? All the capacity is getting eaten by Apple ?
Cognisant US pricing for the HP Z Book Ultra was astronomical, within the EU it's on par with standard laptops and to good effect. The only regret I have is ordering on release day and not wanting to wait for the 128gb version; but battery life and power has remain unmatched to any of the pretty large workloads I have thrown at it!
Outside of laptops, Beelink and co. are making NUCs with them which are relatively affordable!
I do agree, the scarcity has limited their opportunity to assess the growth opportunity.
HP ZBook Ultra G1a is a great option and can be bought with up to 128GB RAM.
So potentially competitive with a 5070M for graphics? Sounds very nice, as long as price and power draw are reasonable.
Power draw is around 75W. It can be manual boosted, but will stay below 100W under all circumstances (from memory, as I was researching the Z13)
The chip itself should accept higher power draws, and ASUS usually isn't shy on feeding 130+W to a laptop, so the 75W figure was quite a surprise to me.
I read somewhere, but can't remember where, that a major reason those APUs aren't as efficient as the Apple ones is a conscious decision to share the architecture with Epyc and therefore accept worse efficiency at lower wattage as a tradeoff.
Can someone confirm/refute that?
In this review, Hardware Canucks tested [1] the M4 Pro (3nm 2nd gen) and the 395+ (4nm) at 50w and found the performance being somewhat comparable. The differences can be explained away by 3nm vs 4nm.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7HUud7IvAo
They are ok but yeah they do not have anything like the memory bandwidth of an m3 ultra. But they also cost a lot less. I’m primarily looking to replace my older desktop but just have to make sure i can run an external gpu like the A6000 that i can borrow from work without having to spend a week fiddling with settings or parameters
I love the concept of it and have been thinking about getting one the only problem I see right now is no ability as far as I can see to get an external dock to run an additional external gpu in the future.
I'm not sure what do you mean? I'm running eGPU with my Strix Point laptop via Thunderbolt.
I've also seen quite a few mini PCs with Oculink port and Strix Halo CPUs.
I was reading people having problems getting the external cards working if they had a lot of memory?
> In a Linux context I got some GPUs working and I can add some [external] GPU devices. Minis forum when I reached out to them said they don't officially support either via the Thunderbolt compatibility USB 4, USB4 v2 or even the built-in PCIe slot. Yeah, not technically officially supported and it's because of the resource allocation and the BAR space and they need somebody on the BIOS team to understand that to fix it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvNYpyA1ZGk
There are ways to manage BAR better in linux or with UEFI preboot environments for windows as hobbyists have been doing for ages due to bad BIOS support https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI
There are plenty of mini-PCs with USB4 and Oculink, and you can get an M.2 adapter (might be tricky to retrofit into a laptop though).
I was just thinking the other day that AMD can match Nvidia pound for pound on the raw hardware specs, and if they don’t just yet, they get pretty close. If AI is a bubble, then AMD should not catch up. If there isn’t a bubble, then there is no choice but to learn to use whatever is out there and AMD is truly set to be another trillion dollar company. The 10% stake OpenAI took is going to look like a Google buying YouTube moment in the long run.
And it’s worth noting, AMD has always matched up with Nvidia hardware wise for decades, plus or minus. They are an interesting company in that they took on both Nvidia and Intel, and is still continuing to do so.
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