Continuing with the leaks from the AMD event at CES this morning, we have the Ryzen APUs AI MAX+ 392 and Ryzen AI MAX+ 388. In essence, the company has expanded the Strix Halo family with two new top-of-the-range APUs that significantly increase graphics performance. Both APUs have something in common, resorting to a very powerful integrated graphics AMD Radeon 8060Sbut reducing the number of CPU cores, and it makes a lot of sense.

Reducing the number of cores not only implies make a product cheaperbut also make consume less energy and, therefore, generate less heat. This facilitates its adoption in portable consoles that already use the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395. Until now, this was the only APU with the Radeon 8060S, but the problem was that it has a 16 core CPU and a TDP of 120W. That is why manufacturers of portable consoles that applied it have had to carry out
frequency limitations and add huge batteries. And all this negatively affects the price. The most expensive APU being layered, an expensive cooling system and spending time on optimizations and a battery that at least allows you to play for more than an hour.

The AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 392 and MAX+ 388 focus solely on integrating the AMD Radeon 8060S iGPU

The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 392 reduces its CPU to a setting of
12 cores and 24 threads processing at 5.00 GHz as Turbo frequency. But the most interesting option thinking about consoles, and even a small, affordable gaming Mini-PC, is the
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 388. This further reduces the CPU settings to 8 cores and 16 threads at 5.00 GHz. And what is truly important about these APUs is their
Radeon 8060S. And the rest of the Ryzen AI Max+ family offers the Radeon 8050S except for the top-of-the-range model. Which is oversized for many circumstances.

Thinking about AI, at the NPU level there are no changes. The same NPU is included with a performance of up to 50 TOPS to deal with the smart capabilities built into Windows 11 with Copilot+. For now they do not offer real utility. At least emulation consoles, with an infinitely less powerful NPU, have real utility for gamers, which is translate game text in real time. And this is a great help when you are looking to emulate games not only in English if you have complications or laziness to translate when you just want to play. But to think about games that only reached the Asian market.

In this way, with chips like the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 392 or MAX+ 388, let’s hope that Microsoft gets its act together so that your AI really offers a utility. If not, it is always advisable to eliminate all traces of it in the system. At least you will gain performance with it.

A more than necessary option considering the current trend

In this way, the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 392 and MAX+ 388 are more suitable for those configurations where not so much CPU power is needed, but a very powerful integrated GPU is needed. So this AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 388 will be very common to see on portable consoles. It must be taken into account that this integrated graphics is capable of outperforming to a desktop GeForce RTX 4060. So together with an 8-core CPU, it is a perfect APU for gaming on Mini-PCs, laptops or portable consoles.

In this way, thinking about having a portable console with more power than a GeForce RTX 4060 is quite tempting. Above all, if the CPU meets the needs. Although given the current market situation, unfortunately, these APUs arrive very late. Since the price of RAM goes down the drain, making these consoles both affordable and accessible. If they were already expensive, now they will be much more so.