Chipmaker AMD unveiled its Ryzen AI 300 mobile processor lineup on Monday, premised on a monolithic 4nm Strix Point crystal. The initial offering comprises two chips: the 12-core Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with a clock speed of up to 5.1GHz and the 10-core Ryzen AI 9 365 with a clock speed of up to 5.0GHz. Enthusiasts digging into the interior of the Ryzen AI 300 chips provided insights based on photographed crystals.
A unique attribute of the Ryzen AI 300 processors is their blend of high-performance Zen 5 cores and power-saving Zen 5c cores. The 12-core Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 incorporates four Zen 5 cores, each with 1MB of allocated L2 cache memory, and a shared 16MB of L3 cache. The eight Zen 5c cores, on the other hand, share a more modest 8MB L3 cache, with each Zen 5c core also receiving 1MB of L2 cache.
The Zen 5c cores deliver the same IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) as regular Zen 5 cores for general integer and floating-point computations where large data volumes are not transferred. However, in workloads involving larger data volumes, these smaller cores may fall behind.
It’s worth noting that the previous generation’s Zen 4c cores perform at lower frequencies compared to Zen 4 cores, as their more compact physical dimensions can’t sustain the same operational voltage. If this applies to the Zen 5c cores, the Strix Point processors would possess an intriguing hybrid architecture, combining power efficiency with high IPC results.
