AMD’s New CPUs Might Just Kill Low-End GPUs Soon

AMD’s secret weapon against Nvidia’s gaming products isn’t another graphics card but a “Max†chip that has the capability to do everything, everywhere, all at once. The company’s Strix Halo lineup, headlined this year by the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, may soon find itself the big brother to a few younger siblings sporting similar graphics capabilities at a lower price point—and offering a more budget-conscious option for gamers than any “affordable†GPU available right now.

A supposed low-end Strix Halo chip has popped up on public data from benchmarking software PassMark. VideoCardz first picked up on the supposed leaked specs for an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 388 and a Ryzen AI Max+ 392. The “+†seems to signify whether the chip will have the full Radeon 8060S integrated GPU, which is what makes these chips so good for gaming at resolutions between 1080p and 1440p. Gizmodo has tested the Ryzen AI Max chip on the Framework Desktop and found it to be a miniature powerhouse considering how small and portable that machine can be.

The Ryzen AI Max+ 388 is an 8-core CPU with a 5GHz boosted clock speed, according to the PassMark specs. The AI Max+ 392 could be a more powerful 12-core variant. The Radeon 8060S contains 40 compute units, which indicate the number of core clusters that define its overall performance. A Radeon RX 9060 GPU contains 28 compute units alongside 28 ray accelerators and 56 AI accelerators that will still make it perform better than the current accelerated processing units (APUs) when combined with a separate gaming-ready CPU. Though, in the end, not so much better for the higher price of fielding two components at once.

Most ‘affordable’ GPUs aren’t improving as fast as the APUs

This year’s slate of graphics cards—at least the ones more people could actually afford—showed us how much the low-end GPU market has slowed. The 60-series GPUs were headlined by the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 and AMD Radeon RX 9060. Both packed a minimal 8GB of VRAM, or video RAM, that limited how well they could possibly perform at higher resolutions. Both GPUs were overshadowed by the $430 5060 Ti and 9060 XT variants. Nvidia itself tried to get in front of the RTX 5060’s slim upgrades over the previous generation of GPUs by limiting review units and even threatening some reviewers by promising to cut off access to future news and company resources if they didn’t limit the scope of their testing.

When you’re spending $300 on a GPU, you still expect to see significantly better processing power than anything with CPU and GPU capabilities housed on a single chip, like AMD’s APUs. Intel has its own relatively cheap GPUs, including the standout Arc B580 for around $250. But Intel has yet to articulate if it plans to keep making discrete GPUs. Instead, the company promised to detail “the next Arc family†sometime in the future, and believes it can compete with AMD on graphics with its Panther Lake lineup, specifically the 16-core variants with 12 Xe3 graphics cores running under the hood.

PassMark benchmarks also show AMD could be working on at least one new gaming CPUs using its latest Zen 5 microarchitecture, specifically the Ryzen 7 9700X3D. Leakers have also recently claimed AMD could unleash more powerful CPUs like the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and Ryzen 9950X3D2. The best desktop CPU from this year, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, used a 3D V-Cache that makes it able to access memory quicker than normal. It routinely proves to be better for gaming and is combined with a GPU that will necessarily offer better performance.

There are some companies going as far as to promote handheld PCs with the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, like the GPD Win 5 that comes packed with an external battery pack (necessary considering the massive power draw of the high-end APU). Then there’s the OneXFly Apex, yet another crowdfunded handheld (launching Nov. 9 on Indiegogo) promising the Radeon 8060S graphics performance will squash devices like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. I’m more interested in a high-end Panther Lake or Ryzen AI Max+ 388 purring under the hood of any handheld or laptop. If we can see a Ryzen AI Max+ 388 in a sub-$1,000 device, it could offer far better gaming performance in a much sleeker package.