This might be the first AMD Strix Halo chip in a handheld gaming PC we've seen, but I'm more excited for those mini PCs around the corner

It seemed like much of 2024 was held in anticipation of Strix Halo, but despite AMD's behemoth APU launching way back in January for CES 2025, we still haven't seen much of it in the wild—certainly not for gaming, anyway. Now, however, we've got our first sliver of a glimpse at it in what is apparently a GPD handheld featuring an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) APU.

X user and prolific tech leaker HXL (@9550pro) shared an image of the device from Chinese social media site QQ (via NotebookCheck) and called it a "GPD STX Halo handheld prototype." The PSP-esque curvature to the bumper visible on the top-left does look what you find on a GPD 4 Win, so this could be a GPD 4 Win or maybe even GPD 5 Win (unannounced) prototype.

The screen shows a 3DMark TimeSpy result of 10,366, which is about what you'll get from a machine with an RTX 4060 mobile GPU. It's also, as NotebookCheck points out, 3x more powerful than GPD Win 4 scores, with that handheld featuring the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Strix Point rather than Strix Halo).

Strix Halo is the biggest and baddest of AMD's APUs. The top-end version—the one we see here—is the AI Max+ 395, which has an RDNA 3.5 GPU with 40 Compute Units (CUs) alongside 16 CPU cores. It maxes out at 120 W, which is much higher than we see in handhelds, which usually run from about 15–35 W.

There is, of course, a question of how much juice would be required to achieve these results—more than the usual handheld TDP, one would think. But systems engineer and tech Tweeter Cary Golomb points out that Strix Halo bandwidth pretty much caps out at 45 W (for 1080p gaming), so a plugged-in GPD handheld might be able to make the most of the chip.