It appears to be like like AMD will quickly be becoming a member of Intel in providing hybrid processor designs with multiple kind of CPU core. In response to Videocardz, photographs of a smaller variant of AMD’s glorious Phoenix APU, as seen in laptops and likewise handhelds just like the Asus ROG Ally, have emerged. The scuttlebutt is that this new “Phoenix 2” chip packs a number of CPU core designs.
Stated to be considerably smaller than the present Phoenix APU at 137mm2, down from 178mm2, Phoenix 2 reportedly drops from 12 graphics CUs to simply 4 CUs. That is a pity by way of gaming efficiency, however it’s the CPU facet of the chip the place issues get attention-grabbing.
Within the Ryzen 7 7840U and likewise the Ryzen Z1 Excessive, Phoenix is obtainable in its full eight-core configuration. That is eight full-fat Zen 4 cores. Nevertheless, for Phoenix 2, the hearsay is that it’s going to are available two flavours, one with two Zen 4 cores and 4 Zen 4c cores, the opposite with two Zen 4 cores and two Zen 4c cores.
These Zen 4c cores are imagined to be smaller and extra environment friendly than full Zen 4 cores. However as we have defined beforehand, AMD is taking a unique method to Intel with its environment friendly cores.
Intel’s Environment friendly cores as seen in its Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs are dramatically smaller than its full Efficiency cores. Roughly, 4 Intel Environment friendly cores may be squeezed into the identical die house as one Efficiency core. In brief, Intel’s Environment friendly cores are primarily based on a really totally different structure. Most clearly, they lack Hyper-Threading and may solely course of a single thread per core.
Against this, AMD’s Zen 4c cores are about half the dimensions of a full Zen 4 core. In different phrases, two Zen 4c cores slot in the identical die house as a Zen 4 core. Functionally and architecturally, Zen 4c is basically the identical as Zen 4. It has precisely the identical front-end, scheduler, execution stage and instruction subject width, the identical L1 and L2 cache, the works.
Oh, and consists of supporting two threads per core, in contrast to Intel’s Environment friendly cores, that are single threaded. The distinction is available in two areas. Zen 4c’s transistor format has been tweaked for a barely decrease clock pace goal and the L3 cache has been minimize in half to 2MB per core. Remarkably, that is sufficient to squeeze two Zen 4c cores into the house of 1 Zen 4 core.
For essentially the most half, then, Zen 4c ought to ship the identical efficiency per clock as Zen 4. It’s going to solely be situations the place the L3 cache is being hit laborious that Zen 4 could have a bonus. In fact, video games are only one such software as Jacob lately defined, which is why AMD’s personal X3D CPUs with added cache reminiscence such because the Ryzen 7 7800X3D exist.
As for clock pace, the rumours counsel the hit is not significantly hefty, with the utmost CPU clock dropping from 5.1GHz for Phoenix to 4.9GHz for Phoenix 2. Nevertheless, it is not clear if that 4.9GHz applies to each core sorts or maybe simply the total Zen 4 cores.
What’s extra, it is equally not clear what method AMD will take with its desktop CPUs in terms of hybrid core designs. AMD’s upcoming Zen 5 CPUs, anticipated to launch in 2024, have been rumoured to make the leap to hybrid cores. Nevertheless, the most recent rumblings point out Zen 5 will in truth as soon as once more include as much as 16 cores primarily based in a single full-performance structure.
Nevertheless, given AMD’s method with Zen 4c and the truth that it did the same factor with barely cut-down Zen 2 cores in its ultra-low-power Ryzen 7020 sequence Mendocino processors, as and when AMD does go hybrid on the desktop, we would count on its effectivity cores to be slightly nearer in design and efficiency to its full fats cores than Intel’s. Watch this house.