A next-gen AMD Ryzen gaming CPU has had its Geekbench benchmarks posted publicly, weeks before it was expected to debut at CES 2025. Rumored to be AMD’s flagship processor of the new Strix Halo line, it appears its integrated GPU can go toe-to-toe with an Nvidia RTX 4060. However, there’s also a massive catch.
Current AMD desktop GPUs may not be the very best graphics cards in the world, but they have been holding their own in terms of raw power. However, it’s the company’s ability to embed its Radeon GPUs into its Ryzen CPUs that has proven a winner in the laptop and handheld spaces. Nearly all the best gaming handheld devices use an AMD CPU with an integrated GPU.
As the company takes over the portable PC space, its new AMD Strix Halo hardware could significantly increase performance. OneXPlayer recently launched impressive Strix Point handhelds, and Strix Halo could improve upon that further.
However, the catch is that we might never play games on this specific chip. The cumbersomely named Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 is potentially only for enterprise or development hardware.
AMD is still trying to make inroads into the artificial intelligence market, and having a laptop chip as powerful as a laptop RTX 4060 onboard could make a big splash.
Back to the results, this new Geekbench benchmark leak puts the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 with its integrated Radeon 8060S GPU above the laptop version of the RTX 4060, beating it by a few thousand points. In the Vulkan tests, the new AMD chip ranks at 67,004 points, and the RTX 4060 at 63,264.
While gaming performance in the real world probably won’t ever be a selling point for the chip, it does give us some major indications of where AMD is going.
Strix Halo is rumored to be set for a launch in 2025, and with the AI Max 390 housing very similar specs (its GPU is rumored to be the same, despite a weaker CPU), this is an excellent vision for the future of gaming portables. The chip is still significantly weaker than most modern desktop graphics cards, though, with the Radeon 7600 besting it by around 30,000 points.
However, that’s still well in front of the performance of most handheld GPUs, meaning Strix Halo could make a massive splash once it lands. Hopefully, the AMD CES 2025 conference will reveal much more about the company’s gaming plans for the chips in January.