AMD’s “Strix Point” Ryzen 8000 CPUs May Contain A Mix Of Zen 5 And Zen 5c Cores
AMD’s “Strix Point” Ryzen 8000 CPUs May Contain A Mix Of Zen 5 And Zen 5c Cores
Chinese leaker 金猪升级包 (Golden Pig Upgrade Pack) has dropped new hints on the AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 8000 APUs, codenamed ‘Strix Point’. In a Bilibili post, the leaker mentions the new chip will once again utilize a dual-CCX (core complex) design on a single die, which was last used in Zen 2 and subsequently joined into a single CCX in later generations (for better latency performance).
However, the dual CCX apparently exists for a reason – as the new chip will use a combination of Zen 5 cores and Zen 5c cores (which was mentioned in the post as Zen 5D for ‘Dense’), which will feature 4 cores and 8 cores respectively. Both core clusters will use their own set of cache, with the full-size Zen 5 core getting a full 16MB of cache (4MB per core) and the smaller Zen 5c core will share 8MB of L3 cache across 8 smaller cores.
This will be AMD’s first attempt at creating big and little cores in the same chip – though the designs won’t be the same as Intel’s core designs. Unlike Team Blue’s approach where some non-essential compute instructions are jettisoned to save die space, AMD’s engineering route involves shedding away L3 cache to make it fit within tighter confines of the silicon, meaning core IPC (instructions per clock) will be effectively equal across Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores. (That said, power-performance scaling could be another matter.)
The leak also mentions 8 WGP (workgroup processors) for the RDNA 3.5 iGPU, which effectively counts as 16 CUs (compute units). Currently the most powerful APU features 12 CUs (Radeon 780M), and the next iteration on the onboard graphics should see a healthy boost in graphics performance. All being said, the Strix Point APUs won’t likely be launched until 2024 at minimum, so until then – take all of these with fair amounts of salt.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
Pokdepinion: The comparison between AMD and Intel’s small core approach could be a very interesting subject.
