ROCm GPU Compute Performance With AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ "Strix Halo"
Blender 4.4 with the AMD HIP back-end did allow for very nice render time speed-ups going from Strix Point to the beefy Strix Halo. However, as mentioned at the start of the article, Blender with HIP was somewhat buggy. Some scenes worked out fine while in other cases the GNOME session on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was crashing (CPU rendering didn't exhibit these issues). Hopefully the AMD Strix Halo ROCm support will continue maturing in a timely manner -- especially given the Llama.cpp segmentation faults too. But at least for OpenCL and other workloads the Radeon 8060S graphics within the Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a was very impressive.
Across 50+ benchmarks when taking the geometric mean for the workloads tested on all three laptops, the Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a was at 2.41x the performance of the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" SoC found within the Framework Laptop 13. 2.41x! Over the Intel Xe2 graphics within Lunar Lake was also 2.3x the performance, which would have been even worse off if not for last week's Compute Runtime release enhancing Lunar Lake with ULLS and other optimizations.
Across the range of GPU compute benchmarks carried out, the Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 had a 43 Watt average and a peak of 77 Watts. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 had a 23 Watt average and a 50 Watt peak while the Core Ultra 7 256V had a 15 Watt average and a 28 Watt peak. So going from Strix Point to Strix Halo with these ROCm GPU compute workloads had 1.87x the SoC power use but delivering around 2.4x the performance for a nice efficiency win.
While the experience wasn't quite perfect and frustrating with the Llama.cpp and Blender issues, ROCm 6.4.1 was otherwise a nice start for Strix Halo. More benchmarks as software updates come and as Strix Halo hardware availability permits. From the GPU compute to OpenGL and Vulkan graphics to the 16-core CPU performance, the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 performance showcased within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a has been an incredibly impressive experience. The best laptop SoC Linux performance for mid-2025 at least and likely continuing that way through at least the remainder of the calendar year.
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