Intel announced its first hybrid desktop CPU architecture in late 2021 with a mix of performance and Efficient cores known as Alder Lake AMD will not offer its own hybrid CPU for consumers and gamers, until Zen 6 comes out, probably in 2026 or later. [However, AMD has designed several new smaller cores that are roughly equivalent to Intel's E-cores, called Zen 4c, and could be significantly more powerful than Intel's.

Semianalysis delves deeply into the 4c, and there are several things worth noting. First, AMD's small cores are large; Intel fits roughly four efficiency cores in the space of one performance core; AMD's Zen 4c core is about half the size of the full Zen 4 core in the latest Ryzen 7000 CPU.

More broadly, the Zen 4c appears to be functionally quite close to the full Zen 4 core, but it has been re-architected for efficiency. Apparently, simply redesigning the core to a lower clockspeed allows the core to be significantly smaller without losing functionality. [On the other hand, Intel's Efficient core does not support multithreading. As a result, the IPC of the Zen 4c core is expected to be closer to that of the Zen 4 than the IPC of Intel's E-core approaches that of the Efficient core.

The caveat to all of this is that AMD's smaller cores will not be introduced into gaming PCs for several years; by the time the Zen 6 CPU is released, Intel will have several iterations of the Efficient core.

However, this early look at Zen 4c suggests that Intel's small cores will face stiff competition. It also suggests that Intel and AMD are moving in slightly different directions with small cores. Intel is aiming for more cores at the relative expense of performance per core, with the goal of increasing threads for parallel workloads.

This difference may reflect the fact that AMD's Zen 4c cores will be the first to appear in server chips with only these smaller cores, instead of the full-fat Zen 4 cores. Whatever the reason, it is probably fair to say that Intel's 12th and 13th generation Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs have been very effective. So it is surely only a matter of time before AMD takes a similar, if not identical, design to its consumer CPUs.