At CES 2023, AMD unveiled its newest lineup of Phoenix Point APUs for ultraportable laptops and handheld gaming devices. Following the announcement, several rumors on the Internet adhere to the fact that Team Red is allegedly developing its first hybrid architecture design for an all-new range of mobile processors.Codenamed "Phoenix 2," AMD's forthcoming SKU seems like a modified version of the Ryzen 7040U Series with two variations of Zen 4 cores, similar to Intel's existing 12th and 13th Gen CPUs. Based on these speculations, here's everything you need to know about the highly anticipated Phoenix 2 Hybrid APUs.

AMD "Phoenix 2" Hybrid APUs: Leaked Specifications

On February 27, 2023, AMD released its Processor Programming Reference (PPR) guide for AMD Family 19h Model 70h, Revision A0, also referred to as the Zen 4/Phoenix-powered APU lineup. Within this documentation, the company disclosed crucial information about introducing the concept of performance and efficiency cores as part of its hybrid CPU architecture.

Silicon enthusiast @InstLatX64, who spotted an unannounced AMD engineering sample processor in the MilkyWay@Home database, claims that the Phoenix 2 SKU (CPUID A70F8x) will be equipped with two high-performance Zen 4 cores and four-energy efficient Zen 4c cores for a total of 12 logical threads. Furthermore, regarding cache size, the P-cores on this APU will benefit from a combined cache (L2+L3) of 6MB, whereas the E-cores will utilize 4MB of L2 and L3 cache, respectively.

Now, one of the major differences between Intel's and AMD's hybrid CPU architectures revolves around their approach to core design. Unlike Intel, which employs two distinct types of CPU architecture (Golden/Raptor Cove + Gracemont) for its Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors, AMD will be taking advantage of the same Zen 4 microarchitecture on its high-performance and power-efficient cores.

In order to strike a great balance between performance and efficiency, the P-cores on AMD's Phoenix 2 SKU will retain the standard design of the Ryzen 7000 Series, while the E-cores will be tuned specifically for a much smaller die size with reduced cache and lower clock frequencies. Owing to these adjustments, the rumored Phoenix 2 APU could be a potential fit for future ultraportable laptops and handheld gaming devices, similar to Valve's Steam Deck.

Moving on to the GPU and memory subsystem, 3DCenter revealed way back in December 2022 that the Phoenix 2 APU from AMD will integrate an RDNA 3 iGPU with two WGP (four CUs) and 512 stream processors, supporting the latest LPDDR5/LPDDR5X memory standard. If we take a closer look at the specifications of this SKU, it is evident that the leaked Phoenix 2 APU shares the same hardware configuration as AMD's upcoming Ryzen 5 7540U or even the newly released Ryzen Z1 chip for ASUS' ROG Ally, albeit with a different core layout.

While there haven't been any definitive speculations about the APU's clock speed and power target, Twitter user @xinoassassin1 posted a frequency graph of the Phoenix 2 Hybrid SKU, running a multi-core test in Cinebench R23. The frequency graph shows that the efficiency cores on this APU operate at a much lower clock speed than their equivalent performance cores.

In this case, "Core 0" and "Core 5" (P-cores) maintain an average frequency of 4.0GHz, whereas Cores 1-4 (E-cores) are clocked at around 2.5-2.8GHz throughout the test. As for power consumption, Xino expects the high-performance cores to attain a maximum TDP of 7-8W, while the power-efficient cores should be able to sip as little as 5W under moderate workloads.

AMD Phoenix 2 Hybrid APUs: Expected Release Date

Alongside these rumors, a leak from @Kepler_L2 confirmed the existence of AMD's Phoenix 2 Hybrid APUs by means of its ROCm (Radeon Open Compute Platform) Developer Tools list.

As is evident from Kepler's tweet on April 26, 2023, the Phoenix 2 ASIC has been listed right underneath AMD's "Phoenix Point" APUs with native support for the "GFX1103" RDNA 3 GPU IP. Given that the launch date for AMD's Ryzen 7040U Series chips hasn't been announced yet, even after facing multiple delays, we can expect the Phoenix 2 APU lineup to be unveiled at CES 2024 or as early as Q4 2023.

AMD's Foray Into big.LITTLE Architecture

With Phoenix 2, AMD is marking a significant shift from its uniform core design and embracing a future wherein the combination of different variations of CPU cores should provide a competitive edge against Intel's incredibly popular big.LITTLE architecture (first popularized by Arm, of course). By utilizing the same Zen 4 microarchitecture for both types of CPU cores, AMD could offer additional advantages such as improved compatibility and reduced fragmentation in application/driver development.

However, the true efficacy of AMD's brand-new CPU configuration in real-world scenarios is yet to be seen.