TechPowerUp has published a new interview with David McAfee, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Client Channel Business at AMD, covering a wide range of topics that include Ryzen AI, X3D, and more. In the interview, McAfee reveals that AMD is working hard to bring Zen 5 to market “as fast as possible,” which implies Ryzen 8000 Series CPUs shouldn’t be too far off, and he also commented on Intel’s Performance- and Efficient-core hybrid approach, calling it “complicated” (read: AMD won’t be doing this). McAfee also noted that Ryzen X3D CPUs overheating is no longer a concern, as AMD has figured out “exactly what happened.”
TPU: How do you feel about hybrid CPU architectures? Does it make sense to bring the Zen 4c core to desktop?
McAfee: I know that Mark Papermaster talked a lot of about different core types coming into our portfolio. I guess what I would say is that as we’ve looked at different core types there’s probably two things that are overarching factors that we think about in terms of how they fit into the portfolio. One is the notion that P-Cores and E-Cores that the competition uses is not the approach that we plan on taking at all. Because I think the reality is that when you get to the point of having core types with different ISA capabilities or IPC or things like that, it makes it very complicated to ensure that the right workloads are scheduled on the right cores, consistently.
TPU: Any hints on the improvements you’re working on for the Zen 5 architecture?
McAfee: What we are looking for with Zen 5 is to bring it into the desktop space as quickly as we possibly can. As excited as we are about Zen 4, I think what you’ve seen from AMD is that every step in that processor core architecture gives us just such an amazing uplift in terms of capability, in terms of IPC, in terms of performance across every possible workload that you see in desktop and mobile applications. We’re working very, very hard to get it into the market as fast as possible, I know that Mark has talked in the past about how Zen 5 is on-track, it’s in-design, it’s taped-out etc so we are working very hard on it and I think you’re going to be very excited when you see that product come to market.