When AMD announced its new “Strix Point” Ryzen AI 300-series laptop chips at Computex, it said that they would be available in July. But when, AMD? Recent rumors reported that the launch day for AMD’s Zen 5 architecture would be July 15th, but we had no confirmation from the manufacturer itself. Well, we still don’t have that, but ASUS has helpfully provided a hint that the mid-July date is in fact correct.
From the ASUS eShop page for the Zenbook 16 S (UM5606).
That hint comes in the form of shipping dates for some of ASUS’ upcoming Ryzen AI 300-based laptops. You can pre-order most of the models on ASUS’ e-shop right now, but contrary to the “most orders ship out within 24 hours” visible right there on the same page, these machines say “We expect product to ship by 7/15″—exactly the date rumored for the release of the first Zen 5 processors, codenamed Strix Point.
By the way, that $1699.99 price there is for the Zenbook S 16 (UM5606), which is also pictured at the top. That machine will come with a top-of-the-line Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, Windows 11 Pro, 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 2880×1800 OLED with a 120-Hz refresh rate and 500-nits peak HDR brightness. It comes with a pair of USB 4 ports and a massive 78-WHr battery despite that it’s just a half-inch thick. Actually, it reminds us quite a bit of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge that we’re currently testing.
Of course, one of the most interesting parts of the laptop for now is that new AMD APU it’s based on. These chips have four standard Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5C dense cores. If you’re wondering what that means, in practical terms the only difference is that the Zen 5C cores will not clock as high as the standard cores. They also have a powerful RDNA 3.5 GPU with 8 workgroup processors (16 compute units) as well as an XDNA 2 NPU for AI work, should that be important to you.
Those same rumors we mentioned before also posited that the Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 desktop processors would come along two weeks after the mobile parts, on July 31st. AMD hasn’t confirmed that either, but given the accuracy of the Strix Point launch date, we’re inclined to believe it. Those chips are essentially a straight upgrade on the Ryzen 7000 processors, swapping out the Zen 4 CCDs with Zen 5 equivalents. This makes them kind of uninteresting from a technology perspective, but they should be quite fast indeed.