AMD Hybrid Architecture Design APU’s Clock Exposure

We have just reported that AMD has confirmed the existence of a hybrid architecture design APU in its official programming guide and will be launched this year. Recently, some netizens have revealed more information about this type of APU, including its operating clock.

The new APU, codenamed “Phoenix”, has three models: Ryzen 9 7940HS, Ryzen 7 7840HS, and Ryzen 5 7640HS, all of which are pure big-core designs with Zen 4 architecture. Twitter user @xinoassassin1 stated that the new APU also has a model with a “big-LITTLE” architecture, a single CCD design, with two big cores and four small cores. The big core corresponds to the Zen 4 architecture, while the small core may correspond to either Zen 4c or Zen 4 Dense architecture.

Twitter user @xinoassassin1 also shared the clock information of the processor when running Cinebench R23. The running clock of different cores has a huge difference. During the test, some cores can maintain a stable clock of around 4GHz, while some cores can reach 3GHz and then stabilize at around 2.7GHz. However, the netizen also indicated that this processor is an early engineering sample, and the final clock may change. When running the single-core test of Cinebench R23, the software will be run by the big core through the CPPC scheduling mechanism. When running the multi-core test, the power consumption of the big core is about 7-8W, while that of the small core is about 5W.

In fact, there have been rumors that the Ryzen 8000 series APU, codenamed “Strix Point”, will adopt a “big.LITTLE” design with Zen 5 and Zen 4 Dense architecture. The Zen 4 Dense architecture has been redesigned based on Zen 4, reducing cache capacity and clock to improve core energy efficiency.

It seems that AMD is likely to advance the launch time of APU with big and small core architectures. From the core specifications, the tested processor by the netizen is not high-end, and there may be some experimental considerations.