AMD TO GO HYBRID
Following in Intel’s footsteps, AMD is using multiple cores
A KEY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AMD AND INTEL is that the latter’s processors have gone hybrid, with big and little cores sharing the work. AMD, on the other hand, has stuck with multiples of one core design. Both approaches have their strengths, but hybrid designs have some telling ones. AMD has a new APU chip code-named Phoenix 2 in development, which is expected to introduce us to AMD’s version of the hybrid design with performance Zen 4 cores, and energy-efficient Zen 4c cores, each with hyper-threading. The chip reportedly has two big cores with 2MB of L2 apiece, and four little cores alongside an RDNA 3 integrated GPU. Rather than two architectures, the chip uses the same Zen 4 design for both jobs, adjusting clocks to suit the application: running at maximums of 4.8GHz and 3.0GHz respectively. We’ve no idea where this is going, but AMD is obviously ready to experiment.