Please note that this post is tagged as a rumor.
AMD rumored to be working on Zen4 Phoenix APU variant with four cores
Is Steam Deck getting an upgrade or this is just a new side-project from AMD engineers?
According to Moore’s Law is Dead, AMD is now working on an entirely new chip poised to feature Zen4 and RDNA3 architectures. The YouTuber does not have the official name for this processor, but in general sense it is a smaller “Phoenix Point” APU which is why he refers to it as “Little Phoenix”.
Rumors about AMD “Little Phoenix” APU, Source: Moore’s Law is Dead
This chip is directly refer to as “Van Gogh Successor” which is the APU powering the current-gen Steam Deck console from Valve. The new Phoenix APU has been added relatively late in the development cycle, so the details are still scarce.
MLID claims that this APU has four cores and eight threads and has 4 WorkGroup Processors. The X86 core configuration is similar to Mendocino, but it uses Zen4 instead of Zen2. The graphics subsystem would get a much greater upgrade though with four times the Compute Unit and RDNA3 architecture which is officially 50% more power efficient than RDNA2 (used by Van Gogh).
One should note that gaming consoles usually do not see a successor this soon, but again, we are not talking about a product that should not launch for another year or so. This is, however, the first time someone actually mentions it. Given how hard it is to buy a Steam Deck with Zen2 APU, there is absolutely no reason for Valve to announce updated specs anytime soon.
| RUMORED AMD Zen Architecture Roadmap | |||||
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| VideoCardz.com | |||||
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| – | – | – | TBC | ||
| – | – | TBC | |||
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