Monday, November 13th 2023
AMD Readies Even More Derivatives of the 4 nm "Phoenix" Processor Silicon
AMD's "Phoenix" monolithic processor silicon drives the company's Ryzen 7040 series mobile processor lineup, and possible some of its upcoming Ryzen 7000G desktop processor models. It is the first chip from the AMD camp to feature an AI accelerator, besides up to 8 "Zen 4" CPU cores, and a large iGPU based on the latest RDNA3 graphics architecture, with up to 12 compute units, the latest display I/O and media acceleration capabilities. Over the course of its lifecycle, AMD realized that it can't use the nearly 200 mm² silicon built on the expensive 4 nm node to power lower-end processor SKUs, and so developed the smaller 137 mm² "Phoenix 2" silicon that lacks the AI accelerator, has a smaller iGPU with just 4 compute units, and a unique hybrid CPU with 2 "Zen 4" and 4 "Zen 4c" cores. We're now hearing that the company is designing even more derivatives.
The PCI ID Repository discovered two new IDs believed to reference the iGPU models of "Phoenix 3" and "Phoenix 4" chips. At this point we have no clue what the two chips could be, and what the mixture of their CPU, iGPU, and AI accelerator components could be, especially given that AMD is able to carve out Ryzen 3 SKUs from "Phoenix 2." We speculate that "Phoenix 3" and "Phoenix 4" could reference rebranding such as "Escher," although it could even be entirely new chips with different combinations of "Zen 4" and "Zen 4c" cores.
Sources:
The PCI ID Repository, VideoCardz
The PCI ID Repository discovered two new IDs believed to reference the iGPU models of "Phoenix 3" and "Phoenix 4" chips. At this point we have no clue what the two chips could be, and what the mixture of their CPU, iGPU, and AI accelerator components could be, especially given that AMD is able to carve out Ryzen 3 SKUs from "Phoenix 2." We speculate that "Phoenix 3" and "Phoenix 4" could reference rebranding such as "Escher," although it could even be entirely new chips with different combinations of "Zen 4" and "Zen 4c" cores.
22 Comments on AMD Readies Even More Derivatives of the 4 nm "Phoenix" Processor Silicon
Not to mention that Vcache is currently still a N7 piece of silicon, although it was redesigned to fit on the N5 Zen 4 CCD. Phoenix is N4.
They're not going to do something as stupid as torpedoing Raphael/Dragon Range 8-core's entire reason for existing, by engineering Vcache into Phoenix.
In this kind of product the power and GPU memory bandwidth is the bottleneck.
The cache mem is faster than any memory so in theory it should help igpu to speed things up. I'm not sure by how much.
Nvidia is doing this with its Super series. Intel does this by having dozens of SKUs.
AMDs problem is a chicken and egg problem. You need money to buy fab capacity but you need fab capacity to make more chips and therefore make more money. They buy all the chips they can afford, sell EVERY one of them and hope their margins are high enough to afford more chips in the next production round. This is the essence of AMDs chiplet strategy to make more chips for the least amount of money.
And the larger the cache, the less hits you need to DRAM, increasing efficiency. This is computing 101.