An AMD engineer has posted a patch for Linux Kernel that enables support of integrated GPUs in the company's forthcoming Zen 4-based APUs, codenamed Dragon Range and Phoenix, according to Coelacanth's Dream. As it turns out, both processors may feature iGPUs based on the company's latest RDNA 3 architecture, which hasn't yet even entered discrete GPU market (though it will next month).
AMD's Zen 4-powered Dragon Range is the company's next-generation Ryzen 7045-series APU, aimed at high-performance gaming laptops and this is the part that's enabled by the new patch, reports Coelacanth's Dream. The patch specifically mentions that it is aimed at APUs and indicates that it supports AMD's SoC21 and GFX1103.
The Linux patch gives no indication of how many RDNA 3 compute units and stream processors AMD plans to pack into its Ryzen 7045-series 'Dragon Range' APUs. But since we are talking about processors with a 55W TDP, we would assume that they are poised to deliver considerably higher performance when compared to existing APUs featuring RDNA 2 graphics.
While we know that AMD's Ryzen 7040-series Phoenix APUs are aimed at more mainstream laptops (and believed to feature a TDP between 35W and 45W) is based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture, we do not know for sure whether it also uses RDNA 3. We hope so, since it hardly makes much sense for AMD to design two rather mobile APUs with different graphics that will coexist in the market for quite some time.
As always, AMD and other companies do not comment on unreleased products, so we are going to have to wait to find out more information about Dragon Range and Phoenix APUs. Perhaps we'll find out more at CES early next year.
