Zen 6 might drop a secret third core—low-power idle ninjas. A Linux patch dug up by Phoronix hints AMD could expand its hybrid lineup beyond the usual performance and compact variants, tacking on ultra-efficient cores for background drudgery while the hungry cores nap.
Zen 5 already juggles two flavors: the standard fire-breathing Zen 5 and the denser, lower-clocked Zen 5C, both packing the same instruction set. A new CPUID leaf, Fn0x80000026, will report core type in bits 31:28, and value 2 flags these new low-power units.
These little cores sip voltage during idle and lightweight OS tasks, letting the heavy hitters stay in deep sleep far longer. Nobody knows if Zen 6 will ship with all three, as kernel support often lands before hardware. But the patch points to a triple-core mix that could seriously boost efficiency in mobile and low-power platforms.
Zen 5 already juggles two flavors: the standard fire-breathing Zen 5 and the denser, lower-clocked Zen 5C, both packing the same instruction set. A new CPUID leaf, Fn0x80000026, will report core type in bits 31:28, and value 2 flags these new low-power units.
These little cores sip voltage during idle and lightweight OS tasks, letting the heavy hitters stay in deep sleep far longer. Nobody knows if Zen 6 will ship with all three, as kernel support often lands before hardware. But the patch points to a triple-core mix that could seriously boost efficiency in mobile and low-power platforms.
