The mysterious AMD Fenghuang is a complete system on chip (SoC) powerhouse made up of a quad-core Ryzen processor paired with 24 Vega Compute Units and 8GB of GDDR5 memory on a single chip.
Kaby Lake-G ushered in a new class of processors. Now that AMD's short marriage with Intel has ended, the red chipmaker is free to branch out and do its own thing. Jack Huynh, AMD's corporate vice president of its semi-custom business unit, announced today via the company's blog that it has created a new SoC for Chinese electronics manufacturer Zhongshan Subor.
The semi-custom SoC, codenamed Fenghuang, will power Zhongshan Subor's upcoming gaming console and PC. The Fenghuang chip harnesses the power of AMD's Zen processor and Vega graphics processing unit architectures. The SoC features a Ryzen processor with four cores and eight threads running at 3GHz and 24 Vega Compute Units operating at 1.3GHz. An Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) might be the first thing that comes to mind; however, the Fenghuang SoC is quite the opposite. APUs don't come with their own graphics memory, and the Fenghuang chip has 8GB of high-performance GDDR5 memory at its disposal. Jack Huynh also confirmed that the SoC will support the chipmaker's existing and next-generation technologies, such as AMD FreeSync, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition software and Rapid Packed Math.
Zhongshan Subor demonstrated its gaming PC at its booth at ChinaJoy, one of the largest gaming and digital entertainment expos in Asia, held in Shanghai. The Chinese manufacturer stated that it plans to release the gaming PC in late August. The SUBOR gaming console, with the same specifications as the company's gaming PC and a customized operating system will be available by the end of this year.
Unfortunately, AMD didn't comment if the Fenghuang SoC will be available outside of its deal with Zhongshan Subor. Its specifications certainly look promising on paper, and the SoC has the potential to give Kaby Lake-G processors a run for their money.