AMD's upcoming hybrid APU smiles for the camera
AMD is preparing its first hybrid APUs, containing a mix of Zen 4 cores and smaller Zen 4c cores. Phoenix 2 will sit below the higher performing Phoenix and should appear in affordable laptops—though when that might be is an open question.
Twitter user @9550pro posted a Phoenix 2 die shot, and it reveals some interesting information. If you look at the picture above, you'll see two full Zen 4 cores on the lower left, but at the top left is where it gets interesting. Those are Zen 4c cores, and they're efficiency cores designed with low power consumption in mind. There's a fourth Zen 4c core just to the right of the two performance cores. This makes it a 2+4 core design which is the kind of configuration you'd expect to find in a budget CPU.
9550pro states the Zen 4c cores support multithreading, with two concurrent threads. That means the die in question supports 12 threads in total.
Going back to the die shot, the large area in the center right is the GPU, with blocks for various SoC functionality including USB, memory and PCIe scattered around the periphery of the chip. The green area on the left side is the L3 cache.
Though very different in terms of architecture, like Intel's Gracemont efficiency cores found in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs, Zen 4c cores will be well suited to less intensive tasks or conversely, heavily multithreaded tasks. AMD's APUs are already known to be frugal on power, and given laptops spend a lot of time idling, low power efficiency cores should increase battery life, while still providing lots of threads on demand, even though such heavy tasks are less likely on a budget laptop.
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