Rumor | Upcoming AMD Ryzen with 8 Zen 5 cores and 16 Zen 4D cores to potentially thwart Intel's hybrid advances, Zen 4D to offer massive multi-core gains at Zen 3 IPC levels

Intel's just announced Alder Lake hybrid CPUs have shown excellent performance that can finally dethrone AMD Ryzen Zen 3 is most workloads, though not by much. However, AMD isn't napping, and the upcoming Ryzen iterations can potentially tilt the scales significantly in Team Red's favor.

This information comes via known leaker Moore's Law is Dead (MLiD), who seems to be confirming an earlier indication of what was known as Zen 4D or Zen 4 "Dense". Zen 4D will be a contemporary of Zen 4 Raphael, is the upcoming successor to Zen 3. Zen 4 marks the move to Socket AM5 along with offering support for DDR5 and an integrated RDNA 2 GPU.

Zen 4D, as MLiD puts it, is a fork of Zen 4 with significant reductions in clocks, power consumption, and a redesigned cache. The L3 cache is likely to be half of what is being designed for Zen 4. MLiD says Zen 4D trades in single-core performance for "massively increased" multi-core in the same die space as Zen 4.

AMD's Alder Lake moment — Zen 5 + Zen 4D

Zen 4D is likely to first debut on AMD Bergamo slated to launch sometime in Q2 2023. Bergamo is an EPYC part that is expected to feature 128 cores. By maintaining what is essentially the same die size, AMD can increase the core count even if it comes at the expense of single-core performance. While this works for servers, consumer applications will still stand to benefit from single-core gains so AMD could be targeting at least a Zen 3 or Zen 3 with Vcache IPC levels to keep everyone happy.

That AMD is working on its own hybrid CPU design has been speculated for quite some time now. Last year, patent drawings pertaining to how AMD would go about implementing a hybrid architecture came to light. These patents showed a few ways in which AMD would implement its own "big.LITTLE". 

Therefore, AMD is likely to do an Alder Lake and use Zen 4D as efficiency cores alongside Zen 5 performance cores. So, essentially, we stand to get a 3 nm Zen 5 and a 5 nm Zen 4D heterogeneous configuration.

It is also possible that AMD could make a Zen 4D-only chip with say, 2x 16C configuration that primarily excels at multi-threaded workloads with Zen 3 IPC levels. A PlayStation 5 Pro with Zen 4D-only die is likely within the realms of possibility as well.

Zen 5 — 20-40% IPC increase over Zen 4

While we still await Zen 3D with Vcache and Zen 4 shortly after that, it is Zen 5 that is touted to showcase the potential of the AM5 platform. MLiD's sources claim that the transition from Zen 4 to Zen 5 could yield as much as a 20-40% IPC increase over Zen 4 and is being targeted for a Q4 2023 launch — close to a year after Zen 4 releases.

Mainstream Zen 5 is expected to offer eight Zen 5 cores and 16 Zen 4D cores. Though AMD would be joining the heterogeneous architecture party somewhat late, if this is leak is true, it is well-poised to take on Intel Alder Lake successor, Raptor Lake, which we are hearing could offer eight Raptor Cove cores with at least a 10% single-core performance uplift over Golden Cove while doubling the amount of Gracemont cores to 16.

The above information should still be taken with a pinch of the proverbial salt since we are a few years away from Zen 5. That being said, if one were to speculate, AMD's approach of 'reusing' existing IP with known performance metrics could turn out to be a more efficient approach than Intel trying to shoehorn entirely distinct architectures onto a single chip. 

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