AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” is beautifully awesome. Probably my favorite hardware of 2025 whether it’s in desktop form with the likes of the Framework Desktop or for very powerful laptops between the Zen 5 CPU cores and very capable Radeon 8060S Graphics within devices like the HP ZBook Ultra G1a. If you are interested by Strix Halo too and looking for a way to obtain one without the high price, AMD is running a holiday special of those contributing PyTorch and vLLM ROCm bug fixes for Strix Halo laptops.
Anush Elangovan as the VP of AI Software at AMD shared that for the holidays they will be giving away twenty “Strix Halo 128GB” laptops, which presumably is the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 models.
To win an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 128GB RAM laptop, you need to fix at least ten bugs from PyTorch or vLLM projects pertaining to ROCm.
Getting ten merged pull requests pertaining to ROCm support with vLLM or PyTorch will get you a brand new Strix Halo laptop courtest of AMD. The only downside is that it’s only eligible to those in the US and Canada.
As of writing for the PyTorch on ROCm there are 167 bugs pertaining to ROCm tests that are failing or disabled. For vLLM there are 80 issues around continuous integration (CI) failures waiting to be addressed.
Those wanting to learn more about this effort to encourage the open-source development community for more ROCm bug fixes can see this X post for all the details. A very worthwhile holiday adventure if you have some end-of-year downtime for those with some development expertise wanting to fix CI issues / ROCm test failures to be rewarded with an incredibly powerful Strix Halo laptop.
