Asus has seemingly just plastered the AMD AI 300 release date all over its various webstores, making it look likely that July 15, 2024 is the date from which you’ll be able to pick up a laptop or other mobile device based on AMD’s latest Strix Point CPUs. The “expected” shipping date for a number of laptops is set to this date, suggesting that will be when you can grab these new AMD devices.
We’re expecting big things from Strix Point, with it packing a powerful GPU, new AI-focused hardware, and a power-sipping design. AMD has steadily been making strides towards securing more and more spots on our best gaming laptop guide, but these new AMD AI 300-based laptops are likely to do well for both AMD and Asus.
To clarify, AMD AI 300 is the brand name for the range of new AMD CPUs that you’ll find in a host of new laptops, such as a new version of the Asus Zephyrus G16. That means you’ll find products such as the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 listed on laptop spec sheets.
Meanwhile, the Strix Point name refers to the internal codename for the overarching design or architecture of those chips. Its design follows that of the Hawk Point chipsm which were found in products such as the currently-available Asus Zephyrus G14.
Strix Point brings an uplift in the number of possible CPU cores compared to Hawk Point, with up to 12 cores (able to process 24 threads at once) available, compared to eight cores (16 threads) on Hawk Point. However, as well as these new cores being based on AMD’s latest Zen 5 architecture, rather than the older Zen 4 design of Hawk Point, they also come in two different types on Strix Point. There are four full-fat Zen 5 cores but then eight slightly less-capable Zen 5c cores.
The difference between Zen 5 and Zen 5c is that Zen 5c has less L3 cache – 8MB shared across eight cores vs 16MB shared across four Zen 5 cores. Its design is also optimized for compactness, with a reduced top speed of only 4GHz rather than the 5.1GHz of Zen 5.
As for the GPU in Strix Point, it’s known as the AMD Radeon 890M and it houses up to 16 of the company’s graphics compute units (CUs) based on its RNDA 3.5 graphics architecture (a refinement of the tech behind its latest graphics cards, such as the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7600).
This compares to Hawk Point’s AMD Radeon 780M GPU, which has 12 CUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture. It’s expected to be around 36% faster for gaming performance than the older GPU.
All that, and the new design also includes new neural processing units (NPUs), which means it will be able to offer localized AI processing for features such as Microsoft CoPilot, although oddly these won’t be supported at launch, with an update from Microsoft still in the works.
All told, AMD Strix Point (as seen in the Asus ProArt PX13 shown above and available here) is a major launch for the company, and it should result in a host of very capable thin and light laptops offering solid all-round performance, good battery, and decent gaming performance. You’ll be looking at 1080p with low settings in games, but that’s impressive stuff for a thin and light laptop with no discrete GPU, assuming our expectations come to pass.
While we’re waiting those few weeks for these new laptops to arrive, why not read up more on AMD’s upcoming laptop CPUs and its Zen 5 desktop chips?