Rumor mill: With AMD riding high on the back of another record-breaking quarter, the rumor mill has turned to the company's future Zen products. Zen 5 is of particular interest as team red could follow in Intel's footsteps by introducing a big.LITTLE architecture to its desktop CPUs. We've also heard that the chip shortage could result in Zen 3+'s cancelation.
Intel's Alder Lake chips, set to debut in the second half of this year, will bring the combination of larger high-performance cores and smaller high-efficiency cores to desktop x86 PCs. 2022's Raptor Lake, which also uses the LGA 1700 socket, will feature the same architecture.
According to MoePC, the Zen 5 Ryzen 8000 series CPUs will also have a hybrid design. The processors, codenamed Strix Point, will reportedly include at least one SKU with eight large Zen 5 cores made on TSMC's 3nm process and four unspecified smaller cores.
TSMC is currently on schedule for testing 3nm in 2021 and mass production in 2022, so it won't be untested when Zen 5 uses the process for its release in 2024. The semiconductor giant said 3nm offers 25% to 30% less power consumption, 10% to 15% more performance, and a 1.7x increase in transistor density compared to 5nm.
The article also repeats recent reports that AMD's Zen 3+ refresh, codenamed Warhol, has been canceled due to the nightmarish chip shortage crisis. Set to use TSMC's 6nm process, Zen 3+ has disappeared from some AMD roadmaps, so this could be more than just a rumor. The 5nm-based Zen 4, meanwhile, is expected to launch in late 2022 or early 2023.
Earlier this week, AMD reported another record quarter as its revenue jumped 93% to $3.45 billion.