AMD's Zen 5 "Strix Point" CPUs will reportedly feature a big.LITTLE design

Expect AMD's future CPUs to have a mix of big and small CPU cores.



Read more about AMD's Zen 5 "Strix Point" CPUs reportedly using a "big.LITTLE" CPU design.

The bigger hurdle is getting Windows to correctly use big.LITTLE core designs. Going to take a long and very collaborative effort on both parties to make sure it correctly utilizes the cores.

NeverBackDown said:

The bigger hurdle is getting Windows to correctly use big.LITTLE core designs. Going to take a long and very collaborative effort on both parties to make sure it correctly utilizes the cores.

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Pretty sure that Microsoft are going to want the support right out the gate themselves when/if it arrives, it's in Their best interests too after all.

m2geek said:

Pretty sure that Microsoft are going to want the support right out the gate themselves when/if it arrives, it's in Their best interests too after all.

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Want and able to support are two different things. They still havent got HDR right. So its going to take time until its fully utilised the way its expected to be.

no gpu sounds good right now

Warchild said:

Want and able to support are two different things. They still havent got HDR right. So its going to take time until its fully utilised the way its expected to be.

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That and some of their UIs aren't even updated to W10 standards and still look the same as W7 days. They slowly been changing that. But that's the problem. They take forever.

Yeah Bulldozer took years to get proper handling and Ryzen and Threadripper models also took some time with topology optimisations particularly for the NUMA (Non-uniform memory access) models, and of course the kind of variation and non-uniformity that can arise here can be of a much greater variety and complexity than just that of a NUMA cluster.

Though at the same time Intel seem to have had these in the pipeline for a while*, and were no doubt aware of the challenge ahead of Microsoft and no doubt the Linux community too in adopting to this change, and have probably put a lot of their own time and money into the implementation work for this, including open source contributions, as they have with previous projects and as other major hardware developers do, though of course Intel have more resources than any to throw at it.

* Here's an article from 2018 from Mark on an earlier much more limited Intel deployment of the concept https://overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/intel_shows_of_x86_cpu_with_big_little_core_design/1

It will no doubt take many years and a lot of "mass scale testing" to get things to a level of optimisation seen on DynamIQ/big.LITTLE systems on ARM, and likely also some work from application developers in some cases, but it should at least be pretty functional at launch if Intel have done their homework and are fully committed to this approach.