Lately a discussion has started that AMD might not show six core Ryzen CPUs but meanwhile the guys over at iO-Tech suggest that AMD's CCX (CPU Complex) design would allow to very easily come up with hexa core chips.


A report over at iO-Tech suggests that AMD’s CCX design could allow them to disable each CPU core separately. Doing so would also deactivate the corresponding portion of the L2 cache but it won’t have an effect the shared L3 cache. If you have a look at the picture below showing a block diagram of the upcoming Ryzen CPUs, you can see how iO-Tech imagines that individual cores and their corresponding L2 caches could be cut off.

If the CCX design really allows for deactivating cores in such a way, this would mean that AMD could come up with six core Ryzen chips that feature the same amount of L3 cache like the eight core processors. In the end it should easily be possible for AMD to produce six core processors with 12 threads and 16MB of L3 cache.

Launching a six core chip would certainly make a lot of sense for AMD. That way the company would have a very complete line-up including a quad, a hexa and an octa core chip, which would be perfect to address different market segments. If we were to guess we’d say AMD will do precisely that and target against Intel’s Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 based line-up.




Source: IO-Tech