The latest rumors solidify a few details about AMD’s next-gen laptop CPUs, coming next year.
AMD’s “Phoenix Point” processors are only now becoming widely-available in the marketplace, but enthusiasts are already looking ahead to Phoenix’s Zen 5-based successor, Strix Point. Not that there’s anything wrong with Phoenix; that’s the foundation of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor in the ASUS ROG Ally, and we came away quite impressed by the performance of that machine, all things considered.Strix Point seems like it’s going to be a little different from the current generation chips, though. According to the leaks and rumors we’ve seen, it seems like AMD’s next-generation mobile processors will include more CPU cores, more cache, and a bigger GPU in comparison to chips like the Ryzen 7 7840HS. Simply saying that is a little misleading, though, because it’ll actually have significantly different CPUs and less cache per core.
Here’s a refresher on Ryzen CPU topology terms: a CCX is a “core complex”, which typically means the collective unit of some number of CPU cores as well as their associated L3 cache. A “CCD” is a “Core Compute Die”, or a piece of silicon that includes one or two CCXes. On early Zen products, one CCX was four cores and 8MB of L3 cache, while Zen 2 increased the cache to 16MB and then Zen 3 combined the two CCXes on one CCD into a single unit, giving that unit eight cores and 32MB of L3 cache.With Zen 4, AMD has created the concept of the “dense core.
