Of the 2 big announcements AMD has made today, the most exciting may be the new Ryzen AI300 series Apu. It's not just that it comes with the same new Zen9000cpu core as AMD's other major new feature, the Ryzen5 series desktop Cpu. It has a significantly upgraded integrated GPU that should significantly improve performance.

A few important questions will soon follow. The Ryzen AI300, formerly known as the Strix Point APU, will appear in the handholds?

The fastest of the new AMD Strix Point Apus at launch is the AMD Ryzen AI9HX370. It raises the graphics calculation unit or CU count from 1 to 12 for AMD's previous generation of Apus, such as the RYZEN Zextreme chip on the OneXPlayer OneXFly. The new GPU also gets a small clock speed bump from 2.7GHz to 2.9GHz.

These 2 factors alone mean that the performance of the game will improve by about 35%. However, Strix Point's new iGPU has also been upgraded from the old-fashioned RDNA to the RDNA3.5 specification.

Despite AMD saying that the first device with ryzen AI300 will be launched on May 7, few details of RDNA3.5 have been released. However, rumors point to an architecture that has largely been taken over from RDNA3. RDNA3.5 will probably get a pretty big upgrade to ray tracing performance. 

Undoubtedly, ray tracing is RDNA3's only obvious weakness in terms of hardware, so an APU with an extra 4Cu and significantly improved ray tracing is pretty attractive. A possible snag is battery life.

AMD did not mention battery life at all in the release material for the new APU. We also did not talk about process nodes. Now that AMD has listed the chips on its website, perhaps unsurprisingly, we can see that the Strix Point is built on top of the TSMC N5 node, a sophisticated version of the TSMC N4.

That is, the exact same silicon as the existing Phoenix and Hawk Point Apus. It's a bit worrying. Like the new GPUs, Strix Point also has up to 12 new ZEN5CPUS. Awkwardly, for now, AMD is limiting the full 16CU version of the GPU to the top-spec 12-core APU model. Perhaps handheld gaming devices don't need that much CPU core. And 12 CPU cores and 16 high-clock GPU Cus are all on the same silicon node as the previous APUs and are very power-consuming.

For now, what we know for sure is that 2 Strix Point APUs kicked off with a 15W TDP, while the previous generation's APUs went as low as 9W TDP. However, its 9W specification was for the handheld-specific version of the old APU, and the mainstream laptop version had the same 15W minimum TDP as the Strix Point.

To shorten the long story, we don't know how Strix Point works in terms of efficiency. Strictly speaking, we don't really know for sure that it's in the handheld. Maybe it wouldn't be appropriate if it was a real power pig. 

But we suspect that some version of it would make it to the handheld. In the worst case, it makes sense to use the 12CU, 8-core variant and get the benefits of Zen5 and RDNA3.5.

There is also a slight worry about the memory bus of the new APU. It remains a fairly modest 128-bit item shared with the CPU core. This may be something of a performance bottleneck given the relatively rugged specifications of the iGPU.

Whatever, look at this space. We'll update you as soon as we know more about AMD's exciting new APU.