AMD has showcased its Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 "Strix Halo" APU offering over 3x the boost over RTX 5080 in DeepSeek R1 AI benchmarks.
AMD's Strix Halo "Ryzen AI MAX+ 395" APU Stomps RTX 5080 In AI Benchmarks Thanks To Its Larger VRAM Pool
Press Release: The new Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 represents a significant leap in AI processing capabilities for consumer laptops. The processor combines Zen 5 CPU cores with a 50 TOPS XDNA 2 NPU and integrated GPU, offering unprecedented AI performance for premium thin and light devices. It demonstrates remarkable improvements in running local AI models, specifically in LLM applications, with significant performance advantages over competitors.
This processor excels in consumer AI workloads like llama.cpp-powered application, LM Studio, which is shaping up to be the ultimate support for client LLM workloads, allowing users to locally run the latest language model without any technical knowledge required.
Key AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 Advantages Over Copilot+ Competitors:
Performance
- Up to 2.2x better token throughput compared to Intel Arc 140V
- Up to 4x faster in time to first token for smaller models like Llama 3.2 3b Instruct
- Up to 9.1x faster for 7-8B parameter models
- Up to 12.2x faster than Intel Core Ultra 258V for 14B parameter models
Vision Model Performance
- Up to 7x faster in IBM Granite Vision 3.2 3b
- Up to 4.6x faster in Google Gemma 3 4b
- Up to 6x faster in Google Gemma 3 12b
Memory
- Offers up to 128GB unified memory vs. Competition's 32GB max
- Can convert up to 96GB to VRAM through Variable Graphics Memory
- Run larger models like Google Gemma 3 27B Vision that other APUs cannot handle
[Editor's Note] In the latest benchmarks, AMD is showcasing the AI performance capabilities of its Strix Halo APUs against NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GPUs. The company is telling us the benefits of its large 128 GB VRAM on the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 APU, which can offer up to 3.05x performance boost versus the discrete graphics card as soon as the LLM model sizes exceed 16 GB VRAM.
That is because the Strix Halo APUs can be associated with the full 128 GB VRAM, while the discrete RTX 5080 GPU is limited to 16 GB VRAM. Even the higher-end RTX 5090 features 32 GB VRAM but consumes more power, 360W in the case of the 5080 and 575W in the case of the RTX 5090.
In model sizes that are within the VRAM budget of the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 GPUs, performance is still stronger on RTX 50 discrete solutions, but Strix Halo still retains a very strong position as an integrated AIO solution.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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