Yesterday a number of Windows reviews began appearing for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 “Strix Halo” with the debut of the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 as the first laptop to ship this SoC with 16 cores / 32 threads, 64 MB L3 cache, and 40 graphics cores with the Radeon 8060S Graphics. As expected, AMD Strix Halo is a beast with its very capable CPU performance and very compelling integrated graphics, at least under Windows 11.
Several Phoronix readers have been asking since yesterday about any Linux reviews of the AMD Ryzen AI MAX SoCs / Strix Halo. Unfortunately, none are currently planned. The ASUS ROG Flow Z13 review sampling appears to have been very limited and I wasn’t offered any review samples. With pricing on the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 starting out at $2,099.99 USD, this initial launch model is very expensive… With the state of the ad industry and ad-block use among readers, I don’t plan on buying the laptop for Linux testing.
We’ll see what other AMD Ryzen AI MAX laptops come down the like but for now don’t count on any Linux reviews/benchmarks, unfortunately, The AMD Ryzen AI MAX SoCs themselves should work fine under Linux for delivering great CPU and GPU performance. The caveats are just the typical issues you may need to worry about for laptop power management, touchpad / keyboard quirks, and other extra laptop features potentially not working out nicely under Linux. At least once any of those laptop issues are out of the way, the Ryzen AI MAX should be roaring on Linux going off by what we’ve seen out of the Ryzen AI 300 series and other Zen 5 hardware on Linux.
If you end up picking up an AMD Ryzen AI MAX laptop, be sure to share your experiences in the Phoronix Forums for how well it’s working and what the Linux performance is looking like especially for non-gaming/technical workloads.
