Next-gen AMD Ryzen APUs may have truly epic performance with 16 Zen 5, 40 RDNA 3.5 cores

AMD looks to be gearing up for the Ryzen 9000 series launch. These upcoming AMD processors are expected to sport Zen 5 under the hood, which is the next major CPU architecture from the company.

The release should not be too far away and you can expect to see them in the second half (2H) of 2024 as we are already seeing firmware support as well as chipset support for these CPUs. Alongside Ryzen 9000, the company is also working on the next-generation stuff.

All of AMD's AM5 processors pack some amount of graphics which means technically all Ryzen 7000 and newer AMD CPUs are APUs. However, AMD has specified that based on the capability of the on-board GPU, APUs will be designated differently, as those with powerful integrated graphics, will continue to be referred to as APUs, while those with weaker graphics, with a few compute units (CUs), will simply be referred to as CPUs.

These Ryzen APUs, codenamed "Strix Halo," are supposedly really powerful if leaked spec details are to be believed. According to the leak, these APUs will sport up to 16 Zen 5 cores (32 threads) and up to 20 RDNA 3.5 Work Group Processors (WGPs) or 40 Compute Units (CUs), leading to a total of up to 2560 stream processors on the top-end SKU.

AMD's APUs currently top out at 12 CUs or 768 stream processors which means the next generation of APUs could be over three times faster.

Image via HKEPC

One thing that has always held back APU performance is the memory bandwidth which it derives from the system memory that is shared by both CPU cores as well as GPU cores. However, the rumoured specs suggest AMD is bringing MALL (Memory Attached Last Level) cache, commonly referred to as Infinity Cache, to these APUs, which will make them less reliant on the system memory bandwidth alone.

This will also help the CPU cores as they can more easily be fed data for processing as the CPU would not be fighting over bandwidth with the GPU.

Hence, the memory subsystem is apparently going to comprise 32MB of Inifity (MALL) cache alongside LPDDR5X-8000 support.

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