Today we learn that AMD will start to be more transparent when displaying the specifications of a CPU or APU with Zen 4c cores. It is essential to remember that these cores are the “equivalent” of the E-Cores used by Intel, meaning they are more efficient but less powerful cores. AMD has been heavily criticized for being highly vague when detailing all the information about its CPUs. While Intel details each type of core it employs and their respective frequencies, AMD only provides the number of cores, base frequency, and turbo frequency. Intel specifies the minimum and maximum speeds of each core and even the actual maximum frequency with all active cores.
In essence, AMD has never adhered to the industry’s standard practices, which means that they do not disclose details as relevant as mentioning the use of Zen 4 cores. Now we know that Tom’s Hardware communicated this issue to AMD, and the company indicated it would review its policy.
AMD’s vagueness with Zen 4c leads to stores selling hardware with “misleading” specifications. If we go to the web and look at the specifications of the AMD Ryzen 5 8540U CPU, the company very vaguely states that it is a processor with 6 cores and 12 threads. However, it doesn’t mention that four of these cores are low-performance ones, and only the remaining two are high-performance cores. The situation worsens with the Ryzen 3 8440U, which offers four cores, but three of them are Zen 4c. This can result in inexperienced users purchasing a slower processor than they actually expect.
This causes some manufacturers or stores to state that it is a 6-core, 12-thread processor, but they omit that most of the cores are less potent than usual to improve energy efficiency and reduce thermal impact. One has to click on the “See Full Specifications” to see that out of these six cores, four are Zen 4c.
This greatly differs from how Intel displays the specifications of its CPUs. Without any additional clicks, the company indicates how many cores are high-performance and how many are low-power, along with detailing the frequencies each type of core operates at.
“We do not intend to create a trend. But we need to review our disclosures and take feedback into account for the future, analyzing both our approach and, from a competitive standpoint, how we want to present it,” said an AMD representative.
“The only thing I will say is that our Zen 4c architecture, compared to Intel’s E-Core, is very different in its capacity, so we are not trying to describe them as apples with apples.”
AMD is entirely correct on this point. The Zen 4c cores use the same architecture and have access to the same instructions. But they have less cache memory and reduced frequencies. However, it is not an excuse for the information not being well-detailed.
The post AMD will be more transparent in showing CPU specifications with Zen 4c cores first appeared on El Chapuzas Informático.
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