AMD just announced two new processors in the Ryzen 7040U lineup. While they may appear like a minor upgrade from their predecessors, this marks a drastic shift in the PC-chip-making industry, especially for laptop computers.
With the launch of Ryzen 5 7545U and Ryzen 3 7440U, the first set of PC chips from AMD featuring a hybrid CPU architecture featuring Zen4 and Zen4c cores, all the PC chip makers are embracing a hybrid CPU architecture to derive both performance and power efficiency on portable computers like laptops and notebooks.
What is hybrid CPU architecture, and why does it matter?
Hybrid CPU architecture has been in the industry for a while. In fact, smartphone chips are the first set of products that opted for this new standard, allowing smartphone makers to enhance battery life while also delivering stellar performance when needed.
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In simple words, a hybrid CPU architecture is nothing but a CPU cluster, which includes at least two different types of performance cores, commonly known as high-performance cores and efficiency cores. Depending on the brand, these go by different nomenclature, where, Intel calls it P and E cores, where, P stands for performance and E stands for efficiency.
The newly announced Ryzen 5 7545U has four CPU cores, with two high-performance cores based on Zen4 architecture and two efficiency cores based on Zen4c architecture. The Zen4c cores when compared to the Zen4 cores will be physically smaller, more power efficient, and offer slightly lower performance, and in most cases, efficiency cores also skip hyperthreading capability.
Similarly, the Ryzen 3 7440U has a single high-performance core based on Zen4 architecture and three efficiency cores built on top of Zen4c architecture.
We have similar solutions, featuring hybrid CPU architecture from all the major PC chip vendors, which includes Intel (starting with 12th Gen), Apple (M series), Qualcomm (Snapdragon X Elite), and now AMD (Ryzen 7040U) series.
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Why hybrid CPU architecture is the future of personal computers?
We don’t always use our laptops for gaming or high computational workload, sometimes, all we do on our laptops is sit on a couch and binge-watch a web series or a movie on Prime Video or Netflix, and this is where the efficiency cores come into the picture.
While browsing the web, we don’t need those high-performance cores clocked at 4/5GHz, as they consume a lot of power and also heat up the device. For simple tasks like video streaming or web browsing, a low-performance core makes the perfect sense, where, it offers the limited computing capability required for that task while consuming the least amount of power.
This is why your gaming laptop, despite having a bigger battery than a thin-and-light notebook, does not last as long as an ultrabook, even when you are using the machine just to surf the web or for writing assignments, as these gaming laptops will depend on high-performance cores even for lighter tasks.
In fact, the upcoming 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors from Intel even have a third kind of super-efficient E cores, which will be primarily used for tasks like web browsing and video streaming to further improve power efficiency.
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The same goes for the high-performance core, say, you are rendering a 3D model, or editing a 4K, where, the combination of high-performance and low-performance cores will fulfil the computing needs. Similarly, while gaming (most games still depend on peak single-core performance), a high-performance core can deliver processing capability.
For more efficient computing processes, along with hybrid CPUs, we also need software prowess, where the OS developers have to implement dynamic resource allocation, which Microsoft has been doing for a while, on Windows 11 with Thread Director, where a specific core is allocated for a task, depending on the requirement.
Similarly, developers also have to update their apps to make use of these new CPU architectures. With almost everyone being on the same page, especially when it comes to hybrid CPUs, upcoming laptops should be able to offer more performance and battery life at the same time.
