AMD Ryzen AI Halo Topology
On the topology side, here is what the system looks like.
This is not overly exciting, but you can see the 16 cores here and then the 2TB NVMe SSD, 128GB of LPDDR5x memory, and the NICs.
AMD Ryzen AI Halo Developer Experience UEFI Firmware
Just a quick one, since we recommend changing a specific BIOS option, here is a quick look at the UEFI firmware.
Here is the main screen. This looks more consumer than server.
Here is the M.2 SSD information.
Here is the Advanced tab. This is where the “Power on AC attach” option is. You will likely want to change this to Enabled so that you can manage it with a remote PDU, or even just to avoid the power button issue we had.
Next, let us let the system boot.
AMD Ryzen AI Halo Developer Experience Setup
Booting the system, AMD has Debian 12. NVIDIA DGX OS is more of an Ubuntu base, so they are both similar, but a little different. For example, when you install Tailscale for remote access, the default installer script errored out for us because it did not understand AMD’s flavor of Debian.
You are asked to join WiFi, even if you have a wired connection.
Time zone is another setting to select.
Username, password, and so forth are next. If you ever have setup a Debian or Ubuntu box, this will be an easy workflow.
Of course, you get a EULA that we are sure many of our readers will spend hours reading in great detail.
Once this was done, we rebooted, just to get into the main workflow starting with the login.
Once logged in, we can see our Radeon 8060S GPU, 16-core AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, and the 2TB SSD.
We got radeontop working even if it was not installed by default.
The big differentiator, however, was the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Center. AMD is not just selling this as a hardware platform. Instead, this is being pitched as an easy way to get onboarded to AMD’s AI workflow.
Something neat is that AMD has the ability to install vLLM, ComfyUI, llama.cpp, VS Code, and more directly from here. Many will install Lemonade, which is AMD’s easy way to get started with AI models.
In addition to those, there is also a Resources tab that has guides.
AMD also has a remote access feature. Again, many will want something like Tailscale, but this is a nice touch.
AMD’s big thrust with this platform is that it is not just a mini PC. Instead, it will support AMD’s AI development platform. While we tested this using Linux, there is also Windows support, just given it is an AMD Ryzen x86 system.
Next, let us get to the performance.
