AMD’s Hybrid Future – 12-Core Ryzen 8000 “Strix Point” CPU Spotted

AMD’s planning to launch hybrid CPU designs with fewer downsides than Intel’s efforts

With Zen 4 AMD has started shipping two variants of their Zen 4 CPU core design, their standard performance-oriented “Zen 4” CPU core design, and their size/power optimised “Zen 4c” core design. AMD are currently selling processors that exclusively use either their Zen 4 or Zen 4c core designs, but moving forward it is likely that AMD will launch new hybrid CPU designs that will utilise both their Zen and Zen c core variants. 

Rumour that it that AMD plans to release Ryzen 8000 series processors that feature a hybrid core design, offering users both Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores. A website called Performancedatabases has claimed that they have the first screenshots for one of these new processors, codenamed Strix Point, a hybrid design from AMD that features four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c cores.

With a TDP of 45W, it is probable that AMD’s Strix Point CPU is targeting the mobile CPU market, and according to the screenshot below, the processor will be made using TSMC’s 4nm lithography node. What’s special about AMD’s hybrid CPU efforts is that their Zen and Zen c core designs all feature the same computational capabilities, with both core designs featuring AVX-512 support. Intel’s current hybrid CPU designs do not use this approach, forcing Intel to disable AVX-512 support on their 12th generation and 13th generation core processors.

AMD’s Zen 5 and Zen 5c core designs both feature hyperthreading and both feature the same amounts of L1 cache. However, at higher cache levels we can see that AMD’s Zen 5c cores feature less L2 cache. Additionally, AMD’s Zen 5c cores are expected to run at lower clock speeds and have lower core power targets. Like Intel’s E-cores, AMD’s Zen 5c cores are designed to be power efficient and spatially efficient. 

It is clear from these screenshots of HWiNFO and CPU-Z that neither program fully supports AMD’s Strix Point processors, with HWiNFO showcasing crazy high clock speeds while CPU-Z showcases very little information. These programs will be updated to support AMD’s future processors in the future.

If these screenshots for AMD’s Strix Point processors are legitimate, it confirms that AMD are currently testing their Zen 5 CPU silicon. This processor is listed as an engineering sample, which suggests that AMD is still in the early stages of their testing process. AMD are expected to release Zen 5 based products in 2024. 

  

With Zen 5/Zen 5c, AMD are taking a different approach to Hybrid CPU design than Intel. For the most part, Zen 5 and Zen 5c are the same CPU core design, offering users support for the same instruction sets while featuring varying cache structures. Zen 5 is designed to feature large caches and to deliver high core clock speeds, while Zen 5c is designed with both spatial and power efficiency in mind, which means that more Zen 5c cores can fit in any given area of silicon, and will deliver similar levels of performance to full Zen 5 cores in workloads that do not benefit from huge caches. 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Hybrid Strix Point CPU design on the OC3D Forums.