AMD Says It Won’t Follow Intel’s P-Core & E-Core Hybrid Approach, Talks Zen 5, x86S & More

wccftech.com:

AMD has said that they won't be following Intel's approach to Hybrid cores and architectures and also talked about what to expect from Zen 5 CPUs in an interview with TechpowerUp.

In the interview, AMD's Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Client Channel Business at AMD, David McAfee, talked about the company's existing portfolio and upcoming products & how they plan to expand upon it. The talk was initiated with AMD's Ryzen AI which is a huge part of the new Ryzen 7040 mainstream laptop lineup codenamed "Phoenix". David goes into a lot of detail on Ryzen AI and it is definitely worth a read over at TPU (full interview here).

The most important revelation made by David is regarding their hybrid CPU architecture. We know that AMD has now two types of Zen 4 cores, the standard Zen 4 and the density-optimized Zen 4C. David says that one way of doing hybrid is to go the P-Core and E-Core route but that isn't what the red team is planning to take at all. The rationale is that having two different cores with different ISA capabilities makes it harder to fine-tune the OS & applications around the right cores. Intel solves this by using the Thread Director technology but it looks like AMD wants to use similar yet different tuned architectures for its own hybrid approach.

In an earlier interview with AMD's CTO, Mark Papermaster, we got to learn that hybrid client and server CPUs were already on the way.

We know that Zen 4 and Zen 4C have the same ISA with small changes in between that don't make them a completely new chip. And making sure that the right core is scheduled for the right tasks is more important. AMD finds little use of such cores on an unconstrained platform such as Desktops but finds that they can offer a