AMD is doubling down on its ultra-compact workstation compute to challenge NVIDIA's DGX Spark and Apple's family of Mac mini systems. Following the launch of its Ryzen AI Halo workstation that we reviewed earlier this year, AMD has unveiled an upgraded model that equips the small form factor (SFF) machine with its flagship Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 APU and up to a massive 192GB of unified LPDDR5X-8533 memory.
Essentially a developer platform, the mini PC / workstation refresh builds on the foundation of the original Ryzen AI Halo, which targeted AI developers by pairing Zen 5 CPU cores with a high-bandwidth integrated GPU architecture in a tiny desktop footprint.
"AI is evolving from assistants that generate responses into agents that coordinate tools, work across applications, and complete multi-step tasks. These workflows demand more than fast inference. They need CPU performance for orchestration, accelerated compute for AI, and enough memory to keep models, applications, and working data available at once," AMD says.
To answer that call, the refreshed system trades the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 for a Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 Gorgon Halo chip with 16 cores and 32 threads clocked at 3.1GHz (base) to 5.2GHz (max boost), as well as 16MB L2 + 64MB L3 for 80MB of total cache and an onboard NPU capable of up to 55 TOPS for AI workloads.
The Gorgon Halo part also sports integrated Radeon 8065S graphics with 40 cores based on RDNA 3.5 clocked at up to 3GHz. This helps push the chip's overall AI prowess to 132 TOPS.
The other standout enhancement, however, is the memory. By bumping unified LPDDR5X-8533 memory capacity to 192GB, AMD allows users to allocate up to 160GB directly to graphics VRAM. According to AMD, its upgraded Ryzen AI Halo supports 300-billion-parameter and larger language models at 4-bit quantization, with the ability for developers to run multiple large agents at the same time with discrete KV caches.
AMD is also claiming key performance wins when pitting the Ryzen AI Halo against Intel's Core Ultra X9 388H and Apple's M5 silicon, as seen in the company's own performance benchmarks above.
"In AMD testing against an Apple M5 Pro comparison system, Ryzen AI Halo delivered higher relative throughput across the tested generative AI workloads, while several workloads on the comparison platform couldn’t run," AMD says.
None of this comes cheap, of course. The updated AMD Ryzen AI Halo with the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB of RAM carries an MSRP starting at $7,299, with retail partner configurations, and is available exclusively at Micro Center.
Paul is a seasoned geek who cut this teeth on the Commodore 64. When he's not geeking out to tech, he's out riding his Harley and collecting stray cats.