AMD is said to be bringing Alder Lake to life with Zen 5 and following in Intel's footsteps by mixing and matching different CPU cores within a single architecture and a single chip. Yes, rumor and truth come together to create something... Welcome once again to the beautiful Speculation Corner.

Following recent rumors that AMD has cancelled the Ryzen refresh due to the current chip shortage, it has emerged that the 2024 Zen 5 will be built on the increasingly familiar big.LITTLE hybrid design. This is what Intel is using for Alder Lake later this year and Raptor Laker next year.

This is a totally unsubstantiated rumor, translated from MoePC.net, and no legitimate source of information is suggested. So treat it with skepticism, but consider it an interesting hypothesis.

This short report points out that the Zen 5 design will be AMD's next major architectural change, and that its APU will be code-named "Strix Point". The implication here is that the Zen 4 variety will not be that big of a change, but there are still unknowns in the 5nm architecture as well.

The MoePC article also has some oddly firm details on specs, suggesting that some core counts are already in place. This is odd, since there will be several different SKUs for the Zen 5 chip, ranging from a low-end mobile chip to a meni-core server giant.

Still, it suggests that there will be a version with eight large Zen 5 cores and four smaller cores, but does not say whether the smaller cores will still nominally use the Zen 5 architecture or whether they will be completely separate chip designs.

It will also be interesting to see what AMD changes between the big and little cores for the purposes of the Ryzen 8000 processor, as these could all be manufactured in TSMC's upcoming N3 node, which is a fairly efficient slice of silicon. the N3 node will be in mass production at the end of 2022 will begin, so it will probably be in commercial use for a year before AMD switches all Zen 5 products to the small volume production process.

As mentioned earlier, the suggestion that this future architecture will use the same hybrid core design as Intel's Alder Lake is still just a rumor, but if true, it means that the CPU competition will become even more interesting. Many scoffed at the idea of Intel bringing a big.LITTLE design to the desktop. [The fact that AMD is following suit means that there is some, genuine merit to this alternative core arrangement. If AMD does adopt the hybrid design in future CPU series as well, Twitter fans may start to change their attitudes about the inevitable failure of Alder Lake.

But if so, this means that not only is AMD following suit, but the industry as a whole is beginning to recognize the benefits of such an offset core structure. zen 5 has been in the design phase for some time now, and long before Intel's announcement about the Alder Lake and Raptor Lake Zen 5 has been in the design phase for some time now and should have been in production long before Intel's announcement of the Alder Lake and Raptor Lake refresh. Therefore, it would be completely unfair to suggest that AMD is copying.

That said, it does suggest that Intel was aware of the idea and the potential desktop benefits much earlier.