The name Little Phoenix would be given to this new processor being finalized at AMD.
When the Steam Deck was released, Valve had created a surprise by having benefited from significant support from AMD: indeed, the American firm has designed a specific chip for the Valve console and it would also be on the point of reoffending.
Boosting a hypothetical Steam Deck V2
Called Aerith, the APU used on the Steam Deck is a derivative of Van Gogh chips designed by AMD. Engraved in 7 nm, it combines Zen 2 generation CPU cores and RDNA 2 GPU cores.
According to Moore’s Law is Dead, quoted by our colleagues from WCCFTechAMD would therefore be working on a new, much more modern APU, for what could be the basis of a Steam Deck V2.
The new APU would be codenamed Little Phoenix. You don’t have to look far for AMD’s inspiration: it would be a derivative of the Phoenix Point announced only a few days ago by the American.
A derivative of Phoenix Point
According to the information thus reported, Little Phoenix would therefore be designed around Zen 4 cores for the CPU part and RDNA 3 cores for the graphics solution. The distribution would be the same as on Aerith with 4 hearts / 8 threads CPU and 8 graphics units.
The engraving process used would obviously be TSMC’s 4 nm and it would lead to a chip significantly smaller than Aerith: we are talking about 110 to 150 mm² against 163 mm². On the other hand, Little Phoenix would be more imposing than the Mendocino chips mentioned by AMD.
Finally, Moore’s Law is Dead mentions higher frequencies (2 GHz against 1.6 GHz) as well as a more ambitious memory interface: Little Phoenix would manage LPDDR5-6400 / LPDDR5X-8533 when Aerith was content with LPDDR5-5500.
Of course, all this information is to be taken with the necessary hindsight, AMD having confirmed nothing. In addition, Moore’s Law is Dead mentioning a release set for 2023-2024, it may be a long time before we have more details.
Source : WCCFTech
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