TechPowerUp Magazine interviewed David McAfee, AMD’s vice president responsible for the consumer division. The most interesting part of the interview was about the present and the future of the AM5 platform.
McAfee confirmed that the company plans to bring cheaper processors to AM5 and over time to fill the space now occupied by the older AM4. Currently, the cheapest processor is the Ryzen 5 7600, which is sold from CZK 5,600. In the generation with Zen 4 cores, it still has nothing to send against the competing Core i3 “Raptor Lake”, which are around 3,000 CZK.
AMD wants to continue to use chiplets, or chip stacking, because it can save space and production costs. But he doesn’t want to start increasing the number of cores at any cost. Since Zen 2, the desktop has maxed out at 16. According to McAfee, it doesn’t make sense to artificially push this number up until the memory throughput increases to support so many cores.
So we could get above 16 cores when DDR5 is sufficiently accelerated or the possibilities of layered caches are expanded. Of course, the alternative would be to add more memory channels, but that’s the threadripper HEDT thing today.
McAfee also talks about the fact that AMD does not want to go in the direction of Intel and use two different cores (powerful and economical) in the desktop. In the case of Intel, this is problematic because the P and E cores have different instruction sets and IPC. AMD, on the other hand, has Zen 4 and Zen 4c, which are identical in this respect, but Zen 4c uses a higher-density manufacturing process, so the cores are smaller and fit more on the same surface.
While one Zen 4 core including the L2 cache produced by the 5nm process at TSMC takes up 3.84 mm², Zen 4c only needs 2.48 mm². Zen 4c, however, does not reach such high rates.
From McAfee’s words, it follows that even Zen 4c does not make sense to use in a desktop, because the company does not want to increase the number of cores there and at the same time is not bound by energy limits. It makes sense in servers where a higher number of cores for some applications is more important than frequency. That’s why Epicy Bergamo was created.
And it makes sense in notebooks, where low consumption is one of the priorities. After all, it is already speculated that the new “Phoenix 2” chips, which are supposed to combine Zen 4 and 4c, will arrive this year.
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2023-07-14 14:45:04
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