More details about the little brother of AMD’s Pheonix APU, portable gamers salivate in anticipation!
Renowned hardware leaker HXL just released what they claim to be a die shot of the AMD Pheonix 2 APU. The image appears to show two Zen 4 high-performance and four Zen 4C high-efficiency cores. For those unfamiliar this would be the little brother of AMD’s Pheonix APU which is targeting higher-end ultra-portable gaming laptops and handhelds (think a more powerful Steam Deck). The leaked images of the Pheonix 2 die however show that it will be slightly less impressive. Big brother Pheonix has eight high-performance cores, while the Pheonix 2 has only six cores, two of them being high-performance Zen4 cores and four Zen4c cores which are smaller and weaker then Zen 4 cores, but also more energy efficient and requires less cooling.
Another thing the die shot appears to reveal is a significantly larger L3 cache per core (which is to be expected considering the lower core count) but with overall less area for L2 cache and cores. This would shave off about 35% in the chip size, meaning the Phoenix 2 would be less powerful but could also fit in far smaller devices. This is especially true as it’s been revealed that the Pheonix would feature 12 graphics cores, while the Phoenix two only feature 4. This is in other words definitely an chip positioned to hit the lower end and/or ultra-ultra-portable market.
Another thing to consider is that this would be the first six-core design in the Zen lineup from AMD, as AMD has always made 2, 4 or 8 core CPUs, so the talk online is that this is likely a hybrid design. Speculation suggests that AMD is putting a 4 core and 2 core CPU on the same silicone, allowing them to match Intel’s now standard practice of combining high-performance and high-efficiency cores for better overall performance and power management.
No firm release date is available as of yet, past leaks have suggested that the APU should be out sometime this year, but given that there are only 4ish months left in the year chances are looking slim. It wouldn’t be a bad guess however to think that AMD will try to get these out before Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs hit the market, which is expected to be around CES next year (so January).
As for what we gamers can expect to gain from this development? Chances are high that we might get more portable gaming PCs like the Steam Deck, perhaps several sku’s of different pricing and of course performance, one featuring the Pheonix and one the Pheonix 2. For reference, the Pheonix(1) APU should have about twice the performance of the current Steam Deck AMD graphics solution. Here’s hoping it will support the long awaited FSR3 which is supposed to rival NVIDIA’s DLSS3 frame generation technology, AMD has shown it off several times but sadly we still don’t have a release date.
