AMD’s next-gen gaming laptop chips may have just leaked

By Kunal Khullar Published December 12, 2024

AMD is readying its Strix Point Halo and Krackan Point APUs, with a potential launch in January at CES 2025. Ahead of launch, details about an Acer Swift Go 16 laptop with an upcoming AMD laptop chip have been spotted on Geekbench.

According to the leaked listing, the laptop is powered by a Krackan Point engineering sample with an OPN Code of “100-000000713-40_Y,” which is most likely the Ryzen AI 7 350. It features eight cores, divided into two clusters of four cores each, utilizing Zen 5 and Zen 5c architectures. It has a base frequency of 2GHz, which can reach a maximum boost clock of 5.05GHz, along with 16MB of L3 cache and 8MB of L2 cache.

The Acer laptop with the Ryzen AI 7 350 scored 2677 on single-core and 11742 on multi-core benchmark tests on Geekbench 6.3. As pointed out by Tom’s Hardware, the Krackan CPU will go head-to-head with Intel’s Lunar Lake processors, specifically the Core Ultra 7 258V, and easily surpasses AMD’s own Hawk Point-based Ryzen 7 8845HS. Notably, it isn’t as powerful as the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, especially in multi-core performance, which isn’t surprising due to the Strix Point CPU having a total of 12 cores.

The APU is also expected to feature the Strix Point’s XDNA 2 NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of 50 tera operations per second (TOPS) and a Radeon 860M RDNA 3.5 integrated GPU with 8 CUs. Meanwhile, the high-performance Strix Halo lineup could carry the Ryzen AI Max branding, delivering a more powerful iGPU capable of competing with Nvidia’s RTX 4060 laptop GPU.

While these details are unconfirmed, these specifications coincide with previously leaked information by Zhangzhonghao, a leaker known to discuss new releases ahead of time. AMD will unveil several next-gen processors, including the Krackan Point APUs and Ryzen AI Max CPUs for laptops featuring RDNA 3.5 graphics.

High-performance Strix Halo models could include the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (16 cores), 390 (12 cores), and 385 (8 cores). Fire Range CPUs, the Zen 5-based successor to Dragon Range, will target gaming laptops.

AMD may also release X3D laptop CPUs and next-gen Ryzen Z2 chips for handheld gaming PCs that promise enhanced performance over the successful Ryzen Z1 Extreme.