AMD Promises To Reveal Detailed Specs Of Its Hybrid Zen4C Processors
Love 'em or hate 'em, Intel's decision to start shipping CPUs with both big and little CPU cores was a major turning point for the industry. Whether you realize it or not, AMD is already doing fundamentally the same thing. The company has several products shipping right now based on its "Phoenix 2" silicon that sports a pair of standard Zen 4 CPU cores coupled with four Zen 4C dense CPU cores.
If you go to Intel's ARK website that lists the specifications for all of its products, you'll see the core counts and types clearly enumerated, along with clock rates for each core type. There's no mystery about what you're getting, at least as long as you pay attention to CPU technologies. We may have occasional complaints about Intel—like the time it described its competitor's marketing as "snake oil"—but we can't fault Chipzilla for the way it publishes its product information.
What kind of cores, AMD?
AMD, on the other hand, doesn't make it quite as clear. If you go to the product page for a part like the AMD Ryzen Z1, it simply says that the SoC has six CPU cores, twelve threads, and that it will boost up to 4.9 GHz from a base clock of 3.2 GHz. What it doesn't tell you is that this doesn't apply to the whole chip. To find that out, you've got to click "See Full Specifications" down at the bottom of the page.
Doing that takes you to another page that rather closely resembles Intel's ARK. On this page, it does clearly state that you get a 2x4 core arrangement, but it still doesn't list clock rates for the dense cores on the die. It also doesn't include GPU clock rates, curiously. There are plenty of sites around the web where you can find this information (like ours, of course). Still, it's a little frustrating that you can't just go straight to the source.
Well, that may change soon, as Tom's Hardware's Paul Alcorn says that his site contacted AMD and grilled the red team about its opaque communications surrounding its nascent hybrid CPUs. According to Paul, AMD says that it will start "divulging these specifications and displaying them more prominently in its materials." Apparently, the first update to the website will come soon, although he didn't elaborate on exactly what that will comprise or when it is coming.
AMD's hybrid strategy is very different from Intel's, as Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores are fundamentally identical in terms of capabilities. They're quite different in performance, though, and AMD needs to make it clear exactly what you're getting when you buy a system with an AMD CPU. That's especially true given that, according to rumors, AMD's next desktop CPUs will also include some mix of dense and sparse cores. Hopefully AMD makes good on its promise to begin divulging this information sooner than later, and sticks to it.
