AMD recently shared a roadmap of its desktop and mobile client processors at Financial Analyst Day 2022. However, it didn't take long for hardware leaker Tum_Apisak to dig up one of the chipmaker's upcoming processors, presumably Phoenix Point.
Phoenix Point is the successor to AMD's Ryzen 6000 (Rembrandt) mobile APUs. Although AMD didn't reveal the exact time frame for Phoenix Point's release, the next-generation chips should hit the market next year. Phoenix Point will see AMD's jump from TSMC's 6nm manufacturing process to the cutting-edge 4nm manufacturing process. The latter offers a 6% smaller die area and will empower chipmakers to optimize their chips' performance and power consumption.
As expected, Phoenix Point arrives with support for PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory, specifically LPDDR5. Nonetheless, AMD may extend memory support to include other formats in the future. In addition, with Phoenix Point, we'll see the first inclusion of AMD's Artificial Intelligence Engine (AIE), an IP the chipmaker obtained after absorbing Xilinx for $54 billion.
The AMD engineering sample (ES) sports the 100-000000709-23_N codename and belongs to AMD's Family 25, which houses both Zen 3 and Zen 4 chips. Hardware detective Benchleaks found the same chip in the MilkyWay@Home project on the BOINC platform. It's weird, but AMD's unreleased Ryzen processors have started to see a cozy home at the MilkyWay@Home project. Back in January, two Ryzen 7000 (Raphael) showed up in the same project, indeed a weird place to be since it isn't even a benchmark.
According to the entry, which carries today's date, the Phoenix Point chip in question wields 16 threads, meaning it's likely an eight-core part with simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Other than that, the report doesn't tell us anything useful.
We'll likely hear more about Phoenix Point in the upcoming months since the Zen 4 and RDNA 3 APUs will, in all likelihood, debut in 2023 to challenge other chips on our list of best CPUs for gaming.
