Several weeks into testing the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 flagship " [1]Strix Halo " SoC within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a, I continue to be very impressed with its performance capabilities for a wide range of workloads. While the [2]Radeon 8060S integrated graphics easily turn heads and [3]the 16-core / 32-thread Zen 5 cores deliver incredible performance in a laptop form factor, one feature not to be discounted that together really helps make this laptop/SFF SoC an excellent choice for AI use and other scientific computing purposes is the presence of [4]AVX-512 . While Intel's current laptop and desktop processors lack AVX-512, Zen 5's efficient AVX-512 implementation does wonders for the Strix Halo performance and power efficiency. Today's article is exploring the performance and power efficiency benefits of AVX-512 usage on the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO SoC.

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Along with the excellent [6]integrated graphics capabilities of Strix Halo paired with ROCm support , helping make the high-end Ryzen AI wares very capable for AI / Gen AI workloads is the AVX-512 implementation we've come to love on Zen 4 and now refined on Zen 5. In prior Phoronix articles I've looked at [7]the AVX-512 impact for the AMD EPYC 9005 series and other [8]AVX-512 Zen 5 performance analysis . Today's article is to deliver some fresh benchmarks with AVX-512 as found out-of-the-box with Strix Halo and then disabling it for showing the performance and power impact that AVX-512 makes for Zen 5 laptops.

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This Strix Halo testing continues to be done with an HP ZBook Ultra G1a review unit kindly provided on an interim basis by HP for Linux testing at Phoronix. The ZBook Ultra G1a is equipped with the 16-core AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 SoC, 64GB of LPDDR5-8000 memory, 2TB WD SN810 SSD, and running on the laptop during this round of benchmarking was Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.11 kernel.

The HP BIOS on the ZBook Ultra G1a doesn't allow toggling AVX-512 support like with some platforms, but with Linux it can be disabled at boot time via clearcpuid=304. This at least clears the CPU ID and doesn't propagate either via /proc/cpuinfo for user-space software scanning /proc/cpuinfo for determining the presence of AVX-512 support. From there a variety of AVX-512 capable workloads were tested for seeing the difference AVX-512 makes on Strix Halo. The SoC power consumption was monitored on a per-test basis too for seeing the power impact of AVX-512. The peak CPU frequency was also monitored in looking for any CPU frequency difference when AVX-512 is toggled.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Strix+Halo

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-radeon-8060s-linux

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-ai-max-pro-395

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/search/AVX-512

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-strix-halo-avx512&image=hp_zbook_avx512_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-strix-halo-rocm-benchmarks

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-turin-avx512

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-zen5-avx-512-9950x

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=amd-strix-halo-avx512&image=strix_halo_avx512_lrg