AMD Bristol Ridge APUs coming to AM4 in 2016

AMD Bristol Ridge APUs coming to AM4 in 2016

 

We have already talked about the rumors that AMD’s AM4 Platform could be launching as early as March of 2016, but it was always up for debate whether or not AMD’s AM4 Platform would be launching with their New Zen Architecture right out of the gate or if it would start off with lower end CPUs or APUs using older architectures with DDR4 memory support.

Now we have had the chance to look at some leaked specifications of AMD’s Bristol Ridge family of APUs, courtesy of Benchlife.info, showing that this family of AMD APUs/CPUs will be using AMD’s Excavator architecture and will have a greatly improve performance per watt when compared to AMD’s current generation Steamroller based APUs and CPUs. 

 

 

When looking at these specifications I know that many of you will only be looking at the CPU core counts and clock speeds, which are very similar to that of AMD’s Kaveri line of CPUs, but that is not the only thing that we need to be looking at.

AMD’s Excavator architecture makes a lot of improvements when compared to Steamroller, particularly when it comes to TDP, with the top model on our specifications chart having specs which are comparable to AMD’s Existing A10 7850K APU, but with a TDP of 30 watts less. One other thing to look at is the Clock speeds of the integrated GPUs, which much higher than their Kaveri Equivalents, with the top Bristol Ridge model having a clock speed of 948MHz, which is significantly higher than A10-7850K’s GPU clock speed of 720MHz. 

 

  

AMD’s Bristol Ridge series of CPUs will include both CPUs and GPUs, replacing AMD’s Kaveri APUs and their newer Athlon 860K CPU, giving this segment of the market products from AMD that will feature more modern CPU and graphics architectures and much lower TDPs, which is something that is great to see from AMD. 

These products will be coming to AMD’s AM4 platform, which is the same platform that will be supporting AMD’s upcoming Zen Architecture and will be the platform for both AMD’s high and low end of desktop products. 

AMD will be using DDR4 memory exclusively, bringing AMD’s memory type in line with Intel’s current Skylake Z170 platform and Intel’s Haswell-E X99 platforms, which should do great things for them on the APU side given how they benefit from high speed memory.  

 

  

AMD’s Carrizo APUs and AMD’s Bristol Ridge of APUs are highly similar, using similar versions of AMD’s Excavator CPU architecture and are even pin compatible on the mobile side, both being FP4.

AMD’s Bristol Ridge may not be using the Zen architecture, but it is still an impressive looking product from AMD, sporting lower TDPs and higher GPU clock speeds than it’s current day equivalent and supporting DDR4 memory and H.265 4K decoding.

One other thing to note is that AMD says that their new Zen architecture has an IPC that is 40% higher than their Excavator architecture, which is also a CPU core design that we have not seen on the desktop yet. Will Excavator be that much of an improvement over Steamroller in any way other than in TDP? Let’s hope so. 

 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Bristol Ridge CPUs and APUs on the AM4 platfom on the OC3D Forums.