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AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

phoronix.com

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Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#11

Post by roenxi »

perplexe wrote: post #7
phdelightful wrote: post #4

I think I’d buy something with Strix Halo or Strix Point if there was official ROCm support. As of 6.4.1 from earlier this month there’s still not, as I understand it. I’d be delighted to be corrected on this matter.

What’s AMD's strategy in not having consumer chip support for ROCm? It's puzzling. No way to get critical mass of development interest if the bar to entry is high.

The strategy (seems to be) targeting data centres and focusing support efforts on the cards most likely to be used in one. There is an expectation that ROCm will work on pretty much everything but their drivers aren't good so in practice it is dicey whether it actually does.

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#12

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

mjevans wrote: post #9

Valve, could we please get a Ryzen 390-ish Steamdeck platform refresh? Or maybe if Intel wants game devs to test on their GPUs they'd cut a small deal to make an Intel Xe refresh.

My guess is that Valve will wait at least 1 more generation, since Zen 6 will be on N2p which will be the first nanosheet generation (with promised 30% power reductions compared to the n3e that zen5 uses). Valve clearly is more interested in a console model with new releases only when there is a massive performance uplift compared to the prior generation, so I think we are at least 1 gen away. Specifically, I think their target will be 1080p/60fps on low settings (or higher settings using fsr).

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#13

Post by opencl »

SecretDreams wrote: post #3

I would have liked to see some discussions on cost and comparisons to dGPUs in the laptop space. I can see it's beating the Intel laptops, but that is expected based on specs. Maybe I'm missing something?

The Strix Halo GPU is roughly around RTX 4060 (laptop version) performance.

Phoronix just doesn't do much mobile dGPU testing in general to have any data to compare with there.

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#14

Post by michaellarabel »

opencl wrote: post #13
SecretDreams wrote: post #3

I would have liked to see some discussions on cost and comparisons to dGPUs in the laptop space. I can see it's beating the Intel laptops, but that is expected based on specs. Maybe I'm missing something?

The Strix Halo GPU is roughly around RTX 4060 (laptop version) performance. Phoronix just doesn't do much mobile dGPU testing in general to have any data to compare with there.

Right, unfortunately, was limited by the laptops I have on-hand for (re)testing... With routinely re-testing all laptops fresh, in this case on Ubuntu 25.04, not able to compare to prior dGPU-enabled laptops that since had to be returned to vendors, etc.

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#16

Post by RandomRandy »

perplexe wrote: post #7
phdelightful wrote: post #4

I think I’d buy something with Strix Halo or Strix Point if there was official ROCm support. As of 6.4.1 from earlier this month there’s still not, as I understand it. I’d be delighted to be corrected on this matter.

What’s AMD's strategy in not having consumer chip support for ROCm? It's puzzling. No way to get critical mass of development interest if the bar to entry is high.

I think that part of the issue is the split between CDNA for data centers [1] and RDNA for consumer products [2] with AMD only having the money to focus on the bigger data center market. There are rumors that both architectures will be merged into UDNA in the future, which will hopefully improve ROCm support, but for now it's lacking

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/cdna.html [2] https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/rdna.html

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#17

Post by bryanlarsen »

mjevans wrote: post #9

Valve, could we please get a Ryzen 390-ish Steamdeck platform refresh? Or maybe if Intel wants game devs to test on their GPUs they'd cut a small deal to make an Intel Xe refresh.

Shoving a 45W+ chip into a steam deck would result in more compromises than most would like.

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#18

Post by jakogut »

roenxi wrote: post #8
SecretDreams wrote: post #3

I would have liked to see some discussions on cost and comparisons to dGPUs in the laptop space. I can see it's beating the Intel laptops, but that is expected based on specs. Maybe I'm missing something?

We have a GPU/CPU fusion chip that is unremarkable, performant and runs well under linux out of the box. There isn't a lot of novelty in that which is, in itself, pretty remarkable. Plus, although I can't really swear to understand how these chips work, my read is this is basically a graphics card that can be configured with 64GB of memory. If I'm not misreading that it actually sounds quite interesting; even AMDs ho…

I've done it. I have a GPD Pocket 4 with 64 GB of RAM and the less capable HX 370 Strix Point chip.

Using ollama, hardware acceleration doesn't really work through ROCm. The framework doesn't officially support gfx1151 (Strix Point RDNA 3.5+), though you can override it to fake gfx1150 (Strix Halo, also RDNA 3.5+ and UMA), and it works.

I think I got it to work for smaller models that fit entirely into the preallocated VRAM buffer, but my machine only allows for statically allocating up to 16 GB for the GPU, and where's the fun in that? This is a unified memory architecture chip, I want to be able to run 30+ GB models seamlessly.

It turns out, you can. Just build llama.cpp from source with the Vulkan backend enabled. You can use a 2 GB static VRAM allocation and any additional data spills into GTT which the driver handles mapping into the GPU's address space seamlessly.

You can see a benchmark I performed of a small model on GitHub [0], but I've done up to Gemma3 27b (~21 GB) and other large models with decent performance, and Strix Halo is supposed to have 2-3x the memory bandwidth and compute performance. Even 8b models perform well with the GPU in power saving mode, inside ~8W.

Come to think of it, those results might make a good blog post.

[0] https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/10879

Search for "HX 370"

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#19

Post by shantara »

mjevans wrote: post #9

Valve, could we please get a Ryzen 390-ish Steamdeck platform refresh? Or maybe if Intel wants game devs to test on their GPUs they'd cut a small deal to make an Intel Xe refresh.

Valve cares about battery life and user experience more than just raw power, and after watching multiple other handhelds deliver very insubstantial improvements over Steam Deck OLED at 3x power consumption, I tend to agree. I'm convinced that SD2 won't happen until measurable improvements at the same 15W power limit the current Deck has. There are plenty of older games and indies in Steam catalog that play perfectly fine on Deck, and chasing the latest power hungry UE5 juggernauts is a losing proposition.

One thing I wouldn't mind having on my Deck is FSR4 support, though AMD still hasn't submitted their Vulkan FP8 support proposal, requiring unofficial Mesa hacks to enable it even on desktop Linux.

Re: AMD Radeon 8050S “Strix Halo” Linux Graphics Performance Review

#20

Post by twic »

How come integrated graphics is in the CPU, rather than being part of the chipset? For an actual single-chip SoC, i suppose it has to be, but even my Ryzen 5 7600X has graphics. I would have thought resources on the CPU would be at a premium, so you'd put them all towards compute. Particularly since integrated graphics doesn't need to be that powerful.
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