During this CES 2023, AMD introduced its new line of Phoenix Point APUs, designed for laptops (ultraportables, in fact) and portable consoles. Codenamed Phoenix 2these APUs seem to be AMD’s big bet this year, in which it seems that they are leaving processors for desktop PCs a bit aside to focus on this segment of the market in which, at least for now, they seem to have no competition.
It seems quite clear that the market is currently trending towards portable equipment, equipment designed to provide good performance whatever its purpose (for example, working on a laptop or playing on a portable console) with such low energy consumption that it provides great battery autonomy. We have already seen not long ago how AMD has succeeded with its Ryzen Z1 Extreme APUs that ASUS ROG Ally mounts, for example, but this new iteration could have several aces up its sleeve…
AMD Phoenix 2, a hybrid APU?
We have put the fact that it is a hybrid APU between question marks because there is still no official information about it, but in the gossip on the net there is speculation about it and, in fact, in the reference guide for Zen4/Phoenix APUs that the APU itself AMD published in February of this year, we already saw information showing the concept of performance cores and efficiency cores as part of their architecture for hybrid CPUs… yes, indeed we are talking about P-Cores and E-Cores, the same as Intel it already has since they released the 12th generation Alder Lake-S processors.
We have also seen leaked information, for example in the MilkyWay@home database, which states that the AMD Phoenix 2 APUs (specifically the model with CPUID A70F8x) will have 2 high-performance Zen 4 cores and 4 low-performance Zen 4c cores. consumption. In this regard, it is also known that the P cores of this hybrid APU would have a 6 MB L2 + L3 cache size, while the E cores would have their own cache (in this case, 4 MB L2 + L3).
On the other hand, it was also revealed a few months ago that AMD’s Phoenix 2 APUs would feature RDNA 3 architecture integrated graphics with 512 Stream Processors, as well as support for LPDDR5 / LPDDR5X RAM. Surely this does not tell you much, but if we tell you that this hardware configuration would be quite similar to the Ryzen Z1 that we have already seen, how do you stay?
AMD will focus on the console market
Given these leaks and the consequent rumors that have followed them, it seems clear that Lisa Su’s company is focusing its efforts on the portable market, which, as we indicated at the beginning, includes both laptops and consoles, in this case portable or not. . We are facing an APU with which, yes, they are a bit behind Intel, but which would be much more oriented towards energy efficiency, and that cannot mean anything other than battery-powered devices in which greater autonomy is sought.
Already in the past, AMD took the lion’s share of the desktop console pie, something that we have been seeing for many years and that was repeated with the latest consoles from both Sony and Microsoft; Now the same thing has happened with ASUS’ flagship product in the portable console market, and we can’t forget that even the well-known Steam Deck has a processor signed by AMD.
For all these reasons, it is logical and normal that AMD wants to continue focusing its efforts on this market in which they are reigning effortlessly, worth the redundancy, perhaps leaving the desktop processor market a little more to one side in which Intel seems to which has once again taken the lead after an excellent time with the Ryzen as the undisputed kings of performance and price.
Now, when will these new AMD APUs arrive? And what is more important, when and what portable consoles will we see with these? Time will tell, but our bet is that by the last quarter of this year at the earliest, although we consider that CES 2024, which takes place at the beginning of the year, would probably be the scenario chosen by AMD to officially unveil this new product.
