AMD may be preparing to introduce a 3nm node with a hybrid design to its APU lineup starting with Zen 5, presenting a serious challenge to Intel's upcoming Big.LITTLE Alder Lake chip. The new APU, which would tentatively be part of AMD's Ryzen 8000 series, could land in 2024, according to KitGuru. It is rumored to have up to eight performance cores and four efficiency cores, bringing the total number of available threads to 20. It is also speculated that there will be a new memory subsystem to accompany the new architecture. At the moment, it's unclear if these changes will apply to AMD Zen 5 processors as well, but that certainly can't be ruled out. The bad news? We don't know how many GPU cores the new APU would have, or if it would have additional processing units like the neural processing component of the Apple M1 chip and the upcoming Apple MX chip. We must also emphasize that this is just a rumor, so take it with a grain of salt.
AMD Zen 5 could pose a threat to Intel too
While AMD has made great strides to catch up with rival Intel in desktop processor market share, it's a distant second when it comes to laptops, arguably the fastest-growing segment of the consumer PC market. As Intel moves towards the big.LITTLE architecture design released by Arm, AMD's adoption of the design shouldn't surprise anyone either, even if AMD mocked Intel's earlier adoption of the architecture less than one year. With the improvement in power efficiency provided by this architecture, more and more laptops will feature the chip design in the coming years as laptop manufacturers fight for chip lifespan. The battery: one of the main concerns of customers when buying a laptop. So moving from Intel to big.LITTLE seemed like a solid strategy to secure its dominance in the laptop market for years to come, which makes this new AMD very important, if true. The problem is that Intel's Alder Lake is built on a 10nm node, so if AMD drops a 5nm Zen 3 APU as early as 2024, Intel's position in the mobile computing market may quickly follow its position in the market. A 3nm Big.LITTLE chip from AMD would have all the benefits of power efficiency and be much more powerful than Intel's rival chip. It only took AMD about five years to reposition its desktop processor, so it's not out of the question to see parity between AMD and Intel in Windows laptops before the end of the decade.