AMD’s Ryzen AI MAX line picked up two new parts at this year’s CES, and the company is already cooking a refresh for the first-gen Halo family.
The first-generation Strix Halo keeps a super-premium spot as an AI PC SoC, and the rumoured Gorgon Halo, tagged as Ryzen AI MAX 400, is meant to push clocks and memory speed.
The supposed real successor is Medusa Halo, the Ryzen AI MAX 500 series, pencilled in for 2027 to 2028 with Zen 6 CPU cores and RDNA 5 graphics cores.
Leaks claim AMD will field a spread of Medusa chips, with entry parts using RDNA 3.5 graphics while pricier Halo models get newer RDNA 5 iGPU configs.
Specs are still guesswork, but talk is of up to 24 cores and similar or beefier graphics, with the platform leaning on the next-gen LPDDR6 standard.
JEDEC has confirmed LPDDR6 will hit 14,400 MT/s across a 24-bit channel, delivering 38.4 GB/s bandwidth per module.
Strix Halo started with up to 8000 MT/s support and up to 256 GB/s bandwidth, and the upcoming refresh is expected to bump that to 8533 MT/s.
With Medusa Halo, keeping the same 256-bit bus width would put bandwidth at about 460 GB/s, roughly an 80 per cent uplift that the onboard GPU will happily guzzle.
Right now Troubled Chipzilla’s Panther Lake 12Xe3 SoCs are touted as the fastest LPDDR notebook setup at up to 9600 MT/s, which is cute until LPDDR6 arrives.
Chipzilla is also building its SoC roadmap while working with Nvidia, but AMD is still talking big about disruptive tech and acting like it has all day.
If LPDDR6 lands as billed, Ryzen AI MAX 500 will make today’s “fast enough” laptop memory look like a bad joke, especially once the iGPU starts stretching its legs.
