AMD has retained its homogenous CPU core design, leveraging a single ISA for its entire portfolio. There have been rumors of Phoenix 2, a hybrid design based on Zen 4 and Zen 4c core clusters of varying frequency. Such chips can be found in handhelds and certain notebook designs. We haven’t heard anything about a potential AM5 desktop hybrid processor, but it may be coming soon.
Crash Test, a member of Computerbase’s forum, discovered some data that points to the upcoming Ryzen 7000 desktop APUs being Phoenix 2 derivatives. According to him, the incoming AM5 APUs have the same CPU ID as the Phoenix Refresh family. The Phoenix 2 chips use the “00A70F41” ID, while the vanilla Phoneix SKUs use “00A70F41“.
AMD generally launches its desktop APUs several months (or even a year) after the mobile systems. Featuring a powerful integrated graphics processor, these parts make for decent entry-level gaming systems. If the Ryzen 7000 desktop APUs are based on Phoenix 2, we may get the first AMD desktop hybrid processor much earlier than anticipated.
Thanks to the high-speed DDR5 memory, these APUs should offer substantially higher gaming performance in a 65W envelope. The Phoenix 2 die features two Zen 4 cores and four Zen 4c cores with boost clocks of ~5GHz and 3.5GHz, respectively. From a technical point of view, this will be an interesting activity. However, purely from a performance perspective, an octa-core Zen 4 CPU would have performed better.
