According to the well-reputed source on AMD’s microprocessors @greymon55, AMD’s next-gen Zen 4-based Ryzen 6000 CPUs will feature up to 16 cores (and 32 threads). This means that AMD will be disadvantaged against Intel’s Raptor Lake processors (24 cores/32 threads) in multi-threaded workloads, courtesy of the 8 additional efficiency cores on the latter. For reference, Raptor Lake will be a mid-cycle refresh of sorts. The core architecture is expected to remain largely unchanged, but the core count will be bumped up to 24 (8P + 16E).
Going by a rough drawing of the AM5 socket (from Hans de Vries), the next-gen platform from AMD can accommodate up to 32 cores or 24 at the very least. It’s being speculated that the 3nm Zen 5 processors will extend the core count to 24, with Strix Point adopting a hybrid core architecture with Zen 5 and Zen 4c cores.
It looks like the chipmaker will be gradually sliding into a hybrid core architecture. This will be initiated by Granite Ridge (sometime in late 2023/early 2024) with a mixture of 3nm and 6nm Zen 5 cores. The former will likely be used as the high-performance core cluster with the latter being a low-power cluster. Meanwhile, Strix Point will be the first “true” hybrid core APU with 3nm Zen 5 cores and 5nm Zen 4c cores. Once again, the former will be used as the high-performance cluster, and the latter acting as a low-power cluster. Strix Point should arrive sometime in 2024.
