New AMD Zen 6 leak: AMD is reportedly preparing Zen 6 APUs for desktops

We already know a lot about the next-generation AMD Zen 6 CPU architecture and the AMD Medusa Point, Medusa Halo, and Medusa Halo Mini APUs that reportedly employ the Zen 6 architecture. What we don’t know, however, is whether AMD plans to release Zen 6 APUs on desktops.

This was exactly the question that was posed to Moore’s Law Is Dead on the latest episode of the Broken Silicon podcast. A viewer asked whether “Zen 6 will have an AM5 APU worth getting for gaming or should we keep waiting for Zen 7”?

MLID answered the question by claiming that, according to one of the leaker’s AMD sources, AMD is indeed developing “Medusa 1 and Bumblebee” APUs for socket AM5 for desktops. MLID claims that the Medusa 1 Zen 6 APU has eight RDNA 4m Compute Units, while the small Bumblebee APU has only four RDNA 4m CUs. 

Interestingly, the Steam Deck 2 might also utilize a small RDNA 4m iGPU that MLID thinks can perform surprisingly well. So, the Medusa 1 desktop Zen 6 APU with eight RDNA 4m CUs might be powerful enough for some light gaming.

Finally, MLID’s source also suggested that AMD was developing another Medusa APU for desktop, but the APU’s specs and current status is unknown.

AMD is unlikely to bring Medusa Halo APUs to desktops

Aside from die size constraints, another major issue plaguing APUs marketed to gamers is their bandwidth requirements. APUs like the AMD Strix Halo with big iGPUs need a lot of memory bandwidth to perform well because they don’t have a dedicated VRAM buffer like discrete GPUs. 

So, even if AMD brings powerful Zen 6 Medusa APUs to desktops and markets them as gaming products, memory bandwidth will become a problem, especially when we consider the current prices of high-speed DDR5 RAM. MLID thinks that this is the main reason why AMD might only launch entry-level APUs on desktops and not something like Medusa Halo Mini.

Thankfully, we are fast approaching the official Zen 6 launch. So, we’ll know soon enough what AMD has in store for us. In the meantime, you can buy desktop APUs like the Ryzen 7 8700G with a decent Radeon 780M iGPU if you plan to do light gaming.