Ryzen 8000 series processors may enable the "small and small core" architecture!

The concept of "big. LITTLE" may not be unfamiliar to everyone on mobile phone chips. In short, it is to call a small core with low power consumption when the load is low, and a large core with high performance and high power consumption when the load is high. To optimize the overall performance of the system. This design is very practical on mobile devices such as mobile phones that are more critical to battery life, but it has not been applied on desktop computers because there is no energy consumption anxiety.

Recently, there are rumors that the next-generation Windows system will provide a new task scheduling mode for such heterogeneous computing core processors, and it will be at the same time as Intel's upcoming 12th-generation Core processor (Alder Lake). roll out.

Although AMD has not announced to the public that it is developing such a processor design, according to foreign media, a new codename "Strix Point" has been leaked by AMD, which corresponds to the Zen5-based APU processor and corresponds to The small core is Zen4D. And, around June 11th, AMDs application for a "task conversion between heterogeneous processors" patent has been published. It is reported that the patent was originally filed in December 2019, which shows that AMD has clearly been here. This technology has been developed for a long time.

The patent covers the most important engineering problem of heterogeneous computing, that is, how to schedule or transfer tasks between different types of cores.

In short, AMD describes that the CPU will redistribute tasks among the cores based on one or more indicators. It includes the execution time of these tasks, the requirement to use the memory in the maximum performance state, the direct access to the memory, or the measurement of the average idle state threshold. If any such (and other listed in the patent) indicators meet the criteria, the task will be relocated from the first processor core to the second core.

Although this is not a very detailed description, it should provide a brief concept of what is being discussed in the patent. Seeing this, we have reason to believe that the Ryzen 8000 "Strix Point" series maybe AMD's first heterogeneous architecture large and small core chips to implement 3nm Zen5 core + Zen4D on a single chip.

It is worth noting that when AMD's heterogeneous CPU/APU comes out, Intel's Alber Lake architecture processor is already on the market, so AMD's first heterogeneous CPU may only be able to compete with Alber Lake's successor, Raptor Lake. This time, Intel takes the lead!