Intel wind at AMD: Ryzen 8000 APUs may come with hybrid design

As it will be remembered, in 2021 Intel introduced the 12th Generation desktop processor series called Alder Lake. Unlike previous processors, there was something special about this series. Intel started adopting hybrid design in this generation, similar to how Arm-based chips in phones work. Intel called this approach Big-Bigger, not big.LITTLE on phones. In the 13th generation, this name was changed to Performance Hybrid. It looks like AMD will take a similar approach with Ryzen 8000 APUs.

Ryzen 8000 APUs may have hybrid design

As we said in the related Zen 5 news linked below, we said that AMD will not use hybrid cores in the desktop main series Ryzen 8000, but can use it in APUs. New information confirms this. The report published by PerformanceDatabases includes screenshots showing the core configuration details as well as the technical specifications of the Ryzen 8000 Strix Point APUs.

The left image in the image below shows the CPU-Z screenshot allegedly belonging to the Strix Point APU, while the right image is of the HWiNFO64. As you may notice, the screenshot on the side of HWiNFO describes the smaller “Zen 5c” cores as E-cores (ie efficiency cores) as in Intel; It shows that it defines Zen 5 cores as P-cores (i.e. performance cores).

But there is a big difference between Intel and AMD. As it is known, E-core units on the Intel side did not have virtual cores (expressed as Hyper-Threading in Intel, Simultaneous Multithreading in AMD). However, AMD includes virtual cores in smaller efficiency-oriented Zen 5c cores in its hybrid design. However, from the screenshots, the Ryzen 8000 APU has a total of 12 cores (4+8) and 24 threads, including four Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5c cores.

For those who don’t know, Zen 5c will replace the Zen 4c that AMD introduced with its EPYC “Bergamo” server CPUs. There are two major differences between the Zen 4 core and the Zen 4c core. The first of these is the amount of L3 cache, and the second is the clock speeds. Zen 4 is designed for higher clocks (performance per core / single core performance), while Zen 4c is optimized for lower clock speeds for better performance per watt. We’ll see that in Zen 5c as well.

Ryzen 8000 Strix Point APUs are expected to arrive in 2024. As for the integrated graphics unit in Strix Point, it is thought that AMD will include RDNA 3.5 GPU cores on it. However, keep in mind that this information is a claim, official information may be completely different.