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What do we want out of Zen 6 Medusa, Nova Lake, and Zen 7 Grimlock? (Die Shrink Telegrams) (Patreon)

Published:
2026-02-04 19:46:46
Imported:
2026-02

Content

Over the past few weeks there as been much discussion regarding what makes APUs "good" or "bad" - and also where Intel & AMD should go next with their future designs...so let's directly talk about it! What do you want out Nova Lake? What do you expect out of Zen 6 Medusa? What are you hoping Zen 7 Grimlock will achieve?

This is a discussion about the state of laptops, APUs, and the future of mobile! You have ~3 hours to submit below!

Comments

Andy Hou

What do you think of the recent reliablility/design flaw problems with the recent generations. Intel's raptor lake failures was mostly due to design flaws. But recent problems with amd's zen 5 processors physically frying themselves is it also some sort of design flaw? Even though AMD mostly blamed motherboard makers for this I've seen reports of cpus being dead from all the major motherboard makers(Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte and MSI).

Woody Chang

One of the features that hs me excited about laptops is that some chips (Apple M series, and Panther Lake per reviews) don't suffer much performance loss off wall power. To be able to do work efficiently on the go is really helpful even if you don't carry a power bank/usb charger with you!

Falto

The hardware we are getting is great and all but what I desperately want to is intel/amd to work with Microsoft to make it so sleep/hibernation mode works properly. It's very silly how unlike on ipads and MacBooks you can close the lid and go into sleep mode and then instantly open and resume work without having to shut down. On windows this is supposed to work but as we all know it's buggy as half time it just shuts screen off and drains battery while being hot.

Athena Azuraea

What I want is an intuitive energy efficient design to get around 3-4h of battery life while actually doing something in Windows other than just writing Word documents. Instead of focusing on performance in the 15-25W segment, actually make these APUs USABLE in the <= 5w range so our batteries actually start lasting. We see this misguided effort to "optimization" to make the silicon draw as little power as possible when parts of it isn't used, but start using Teams and the entire APU will instantly become loaded and your battery life drops to a few hours at most. So do it right. Make it simple. Don't add these power optimizations that no one is going to implement or figure out how to use. Design your silicone to work at lower power. Make it as efficient as possible at <= 5W. Focus your energy there.

Woody Chang

Zen 6 APUs need to have the latest tech that RDNA5 supports, such as whatever the next iteration of FSR Redstone is. More importanly, AMD needs to give support for RDNA5 as long as they are selling them new. The way they have refused to roll out INT8 FSR4 for RDNA 2/3/3.5 despite everyone knowing it works well enough, makes me concerned that AMD do something similarly stupid with Zen6/RDNA5 APU support

magneticmanul

I think you made a good point during last BS with Just Josh about the Medusa advantage for OEMs of having a wide range of performance SKUs going into one common socket. AMD had Strix Point which seemed very impressive at launch, but it seems most OEMs simply skipped it because Kraken was the price point and performance they wanted for their mainstream. Lisa Su has been saying they are gaining share in enterprise notebooks, many of which offer Hawk and Kraken in the same design. How do you imagine gaming laptop OEMs could use this modularity? I think Intel is on the right track with offering a very high end iGPU for thin and light notebooks while offering SKUs with a small GPU for gaming or workstations. Strix missed the mark by having a GPU that was unappreciated by mainstream office users but also not fast enough to replace even a low end gaming GPU.

Jihad ROUANI

What I want from Zen6 and Nova lake is a modern uArch, x86 core as it is right now is full of legacy decoders (some are literal 3+ decades old), we need a completely new design, yes it would break backwards compatibly with old software but if that's the price we have to pay to compete with Apple's extremely fast single core performance then so be it, Apple made a clean cut in 2020 when they released M1, they forced everyone to modernize their code for the new uArch instead of filling their core with garbage lecagy decoders and developers did the work and optimized their programs for the new hardware and now they have a very modern design that's extremely fast. The second thing I want is even bigger focus on energy efficiency, PTL is impressive.. only by Intel and AMD standards, it still eats more power than Apple's P/E cores.

Gob

I have a Z1 Extreme Legion Go S and really like it. What I want is a Medusa Halo handheld like the GPD Win 5 with Strix Halo. Having a dockable handheld with enough docked power for any task is appealing. I would have bought a Win 5 but I didn’t want to be stuck with RDNA 3.5. A Medusa Halo with RDNA 5 in a dockable handheld with 120W available like the Win 5 would be an instant buy for me. I’d install Linux and be set. I could consolidate my gaming to one device and that would be awesome! I have less interest in what Intel is doing as they will move to using Nvidia chiplets and I’m not convinced the stability will be there.

Lucas

One of the primary bottlenecks of AMD igpus except for Strix Halo is the Memory bandwidth. An increase in that, or some other way to make use of that untapped gpu power would be lovely.

Prior is the theme 999

Only thing I want for zen 6 is for RDNA 3.5 to not be listed as the igpu.

transpose1195

Another listener (Gob) mentioned also owning a Legion Go S with a Z1 Extreme but it looks like we actually want opposite things out of it! I'm most interested in extending playtime through efficiency, rather than pushing as much performance as possible. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

KingKoro

For Medusa I want to see a few RDNA4 iGPUs at the minimum. LPDDR5X 9600MT/s+ and some level of "Infinity Cache" would be very welcome. On the NPU side, I'd be interested to know if there will be a XDNA3 architecture. If higher-end Medusa Point cannot compete with Panther Lake on the performance front, it will have a hard time in my opinion. Lastly for a potential Medusa Halo AI Mini PC platform, I want to see them integrate some Pensando 100G to 200G RDMA NICs like DGX Spark does.

Deadeyes

Sorry bud :(

Naut Appl

With AMD graphics, right now we are seeing APUs with previous architectures that are denied support for features that they can run (FSR). Would like to see Zen 6 APUs have RDNA5 graphics with a commitment to bring upcoming software developments to the architecture. Who wants a pre-abandoned iGPU?

CompressedAIBlocks

Do you think we'll get a Bartlett Lake launch to go against Zen 6 Medusa? 🤔

Billy Mays

For the purposes of gaming, performance increases in cpu over the last couple of years haven’t mattered that much. CPUs haven’t been a performance limitation for me personally. I’m more interested in power efficiency in regards to laptops and handheld APUs. With low power CPUs, that’ll leave more room in the power budget for the gpu where more performance is really needed for my use case.

I Dude

What finally discouraged me from using my old laptop is the old battery (its old... 6700hq with GTX1060) I did try a replacement battery, but it was never the same, therefore I don't really want another laptop with an Nvidia GPU/that suffers from battery life problems. Im still in the market for a slim laptop to does ok gaming. I have been following Strix halo releases, but havent seen a laptop that I like. Watching Josh's CES (and Panther Lake) coverage gets me excited for the laptop design wins. AMD needs more variety in its higher end designs. Even with Panther Lake's release, I would still prefer the (plugged in) performance of Strix Halo. but its not winning by much, only 30% when plugged in, and its even losing by 20% when on battery. Im ok with that performance, I just need those Laptop Design wins though. You have more recently mentioned Gorgon Halo. Is it basically a silicon stepping of Strix Halo that might be released later this year? (emphasis on might) What are the approximate timelines for future releases: Medusa Point H1 2027?, Medusa Halo H2 2027?

shea

iGPU Memory Bandwidth

TechnoLadz

I would like to see Grimlock use RDNA 6 if possible. Ideally: Grimlock Point Regular, 4 WGPs of RDNA 6 Grimlock Point "additional cores": 8 WGPs of RDNA 6 Grimlock Halo Mini: 16 WGPs of RDNA 6 Grimlock Halo: 48 WGPs of RDNA 6 Grimlock Halo "90 Killer": 64 WGPs of RDNA 6; Note: These GPUs would be tileable per earlier parents - so 4 WGP and 16 WGP are "tiles"; hence why there's so many configurations. Think of it similar to what Intel did with Panther Lake but expanded

Fipa

Have newer RDNA shipped faster to new APU generations. Make a stable driver, battery management and daily experience from the low-end to upper-mid range. We market doesn't need overly flashy stuff, it needs reliability and dependability for more people to preffer AMD hardware, not just repackaging prior generations with a new number.

nonews

i would like to see a zen6 client product shipped this year. i would like it tooerform well on 600 series boards but take avantage of faster memory. for Zen 7 i would like camm memory support and new socket that supports mega APUs with LPCAMM or memory on the APU assembly (return to cpu slots?)

Ketafuki

The question: If LPW/LLW/"HBM Mobile" DRAM works really well for Apple, how long would you expect it to become available for other hardware makers? "What do you hoping Zen 7 will achieve?": I would love to see at least one desktop chip with an FPGA chiplet alongside a single CPU chiplet. Basically an FPGA dev kit in a CPU package. Whatever the "cheap" node process is by the time Zen 7 comes out, (4nm maybe?), it would be gargantuan in LE count compared to MiSTer's Cyclone V.

Donkey Kong Odyssey

I hope Zen 6 Medusa appears in PC Handhelds, with Medusa Halo Mini being the high-end APU for $1000-$1300 handhelds and laptops, with Medusa Halo being the $1500+ handheld/Laptop SKU.