In an interview with Tom’s Hardware said that AMD officially plans on introducing ‘hybrid’ CPUs to its consumer product lineup.

For those who came in late, the hybrid architecture uses larger cores designed for performance mixed in with smaller efficiency cores. The performance cores handle the main bulk of processing, while the efficiency cores take care of background processes to free up resources. Intel did this with its 12th-Gen chips to significant effect.

Papermaster said that one of the keys to future-proofing CPU tech is knowing when to increase the CPU core count and when to rely more on the hybrid model, as different applications depend on different core types to run efficiently.

Core counts aren’t the only way to improve CPU performance, and that AMD must be able to “provide customers with the kind of diversity of computation elements they need, he said.

AMD was using AI in its chip design, testing, and verification phases, as well as plans to harness generative AI for chip design in the future.

“It's already in our PC lineup, with our Ryzen 7040. It's accelerating across our embedded, in our adaptive compute, our former Xilinx product line, and even in GPUs it has been used to interpolate frames and to get a better resolution.”

Papermaster said that AI possessed the ability to iterate, learn - and then improve its designs. It is useful when applied to AMD’s verification suites, helping to reduce the amount of time it takes to find bugs during the development process.

While the hybrid news is expected, using AI for GPU development, feels more like a way to remove humans from the testing process at AMD. It could also backfire badly and AMD still needs to have a better footing in the chip market if it is going to kick Chipzilla to the curb.