AMD seems to be gearing up to launch the Ryzen 9000 series. These upcoming AMD processors are expected to feature Zen 5 under the hood, which is the company’s next major processor architecture.

The release shouldn’t be too far and you can expect to see them in the second half (2H) of 2024 as we are already seeing firmware support as well as chipset support for these processors. Along with Ryzen 9000, the company is also working on next generation stuff.

All of AMD’s AM5 processors pack some amount of graphics, which means that technically all of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and newer processors are APUs. However, AMD noted that based on the capability of the built-in GPU, APUs will be labeled differently, as those with powerful integrated graphics will continue to be called APUs, while those with weaker graphics, with few computing units. (CUs), will simply be called CPUs.

The Ryzen APUs, codenamed “Strix Halo”, are supposedly very powerful if the leaked specs are to be believed. According to the leak, these APUs will feature up to 16 Zen 5 cores (32 threads) and up to 20 RDNA 3.5 workgroup processors (WGPs) or 40 compute units (CUs), leading to a total of up to 2560 flow processors on the top SKU.

AMD’s APUs are now up to 12 CUs or 768 stream processors, which means the next generation of APUs could be three times faster.

One thing that has always held back APU performance is memory bandwidth which comes from the system memory shared by both the CPU and GPU cores. However, the rumored specs indicate that AMD is bringing MALL (Memory Attached Last Level) cache, commonly known as Infinity Cache, to these APUs, which will make them less reliant on system memory bandwidth alone.

This will also help the CPU cores as they can more easily be fed data to process as the CPU will not be fighting for bandwidth with the GPU.

Thus, the memory subsystem will likely include 32MB of Inifity cache (MALL) alongside LPDDR5X-8000 support.