I have another strix halo that I got for half the price (before this price increase world wide). AMD making lemonade is one of the best reasons to get a strix halo. Lemonade + qwen3.6 35B MTP @ Q8_0 + anythingLLM (in docker) replaced 90%+ of my AI usage. And it’s fully local! Setting everything up took less than 3 hours total, including installing the OS
AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
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Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#12Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#13The one thing that's new/worth pointing out are the https://developer.amd.com/playbooks/ (https://github.com/amd/playbooks) - this is AMD's answer to Nvidia's playbooks (https://build.nvidia.com/spark / https://github.com/NVIDIA/dgx-spark-playbooks ) - I think it's great that they're actually taking this more seriously.
Hardware is the exact same as what used to be available for $2K last year (and is still $1K cheaper from Chinese OEMs).
LTT Lab's LLM testing is getting more sophisticated, which is great - I think it's worth noting that ROCm/Vulkan versions and llama.cpp build versions are going to have some big differences for numbers.
For those wanting to get the most out of their Strix Halos, there's both kernel tweaks and utilities like ryzenadj that can help you get the most out of it. ( http://strixhalo.wiki/ has most of that documented). Also, if you're running for coding or agentic work, if you model supports MTP, that's mature and should give you a decent (30%?) decode boost.
Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#14$4k is pretty darn spendy. I recently purchased a refurbished Corsair AI Workstation with almost the same hardware (same chip, same 128GB RAM, but only 1TB storage) for $2160. Pretty good deal! Codex and I wrote a Linux driver to report the power mode of the device: https://github.com/pettijohn/corsair-ai-workstation-performa...
Is that price still available?
Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#15How much are we going to pay for "AI kits" once the DRAM shortage is over? Will we be able to run a local model equivalent to the current AI frontier in sub $1000 hardware, even if dedicated, in 5 years?
frontier to laptop runnable open weight so far seems to be ~2 years latency, so maybe there's some hope
Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#16I recently bought a few sparks from Micro Center for the exact same price and it comes with ConnectX-7 200Gbps inter-connectivity. Not sure how AMD feels it can charge exactly the same for less.
Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#17Are the likes of Dell and Lenovo not going to be annoyed that AMD are cutting them out?
As traditionally AMD was a supplier of parts.
Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#18Does this have the same memory bandwidth problems as the spark?
Yes. And the same not-enough-memory problems too
Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#19Bosgame is $2799 does the same thing if you plan to run only 1 of them
The repeated claim that all these different forms are not directly comparable is a very strange aspect.
Only thing that separates them is the build quality and the extra 20W of boost the framework desktop and this variant support.
They have a note on the thermals but no measurement of noise. Doesn't matter if it's stricly a whoosh or a whine, only if they bother people in the same room. And the small ones like Bosgame get a consistent complaint about the noise in in-depth youtube videos.
Re: AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
#20Are the likes of Dell and Lenovo not going to be annoyed that AMD are cutting them out? As traditionally AMD was a supplier of parts.
Do they care that Microsoft is selling the Surface, or that Intel used to sell the NUC?