AMD ‘pre-broadcasts’ 7th-era Bristol Ridge, plans for Computex launch

It’s best April, but AMD is raring to speak approximately its next-generation circle of relatives of APUs and their numerous development. the imminent Bristol Ridge own family of APUs will debut on mobile first — AMD has partnered with HP to launch a brand new new release of the Envy x360 based on its upcoming seventh-technology hardware.

Pre-announcing Bristol Ridge

AMD is looking this a “pre-declaration,” a time period which rings a bell in my memory of George Carlin’s rant about the abuse of the prefix “pre.” allow’s just call this an early reminder AMD has new hardware coming down the pipe and a examine what the new chips are able to. AMD is forecasting an 23% improvement in 3DMark scores, and a 5% improvement in PCMark 8v2.

the ones performance gains are clean to explain when you seek advice from the notes in the back of the presentation. AMD’s Bristol Ridge became examined the usage of DDR4-1866, at the same time as the older Carrizo systems are tapping DDR3-1600. That gives Bristol Ridge a roughly 17% reminiscence bandwidth advantage over Carrizo, and we already recognize AMD’s APUs are nearly entirely bandwidth-bound. Toss in a small center clock growth and a bit extra pinnacle-end CPU frequency, and that’s the distinction among the 2 chips.

AMD is likewise speaking up its Cinebench ratings, as proven below, however the business enterprise’s pronounced baseline benchmarks are a bit off in comparison to what we’ve visible in retail. We elected to create our own graph for this facts since the slide isn’t absolutely clean.

AMD’s slide claims this statistics is primarily based on Cinebench eleven.five, even as the actual footnote says Cinebench R15. R15 is a better fit for the statistics, so we’re going to go along with that. in spite of this, there’s an atypical discrepancy inside the claimed overall performance of the Kaveri platform. AMD reports a sixty six.48 in Cinebench R15 — substantially under the measured performance median of 75 in that benchmark as recorded through Notebookcheck.internet. The Carrizo rankings, in comparison, are precisely in keeping with what we’d anticipate from the FX-8800P. either way, AMD is claiming to have picked up a first rate 14% from Bristol Ridge over and above Carrizo. better faster clocks should effortlessly yield that type of improvement, although this will also suggest the hypothesis of a 14nm Bristol Ridge turned into incorrect — if AMD had really taken Carrizo down to 14nm, we’d see larger improvements.

New model numbers, suggestions of a product role

i believe this last records isn’t records AMD meant to encompass, but its presentation also carries connection with at the least one specific Bristol Ridge processor — an FX-9830P geared up with 8GB of DDR4-2400 RAM. I’m no longer certain how tons weight to position in this, because the same annotation additionally claims AMD’s FX-7600P was tested using 8GB of DDR4, and Kaveri doesn’t aid that RAM standard.

What’s truly greater exciting is AMD appears to be showcasing unique machine configurations to OEMs, as a minimum. The annotated slides reference a “work faster” configuration (geared up with a 35W CPU and 8GB of DDR4-2400) as well as a “Play Longer” machine (15W CPU with 8GB of DDR4-1866). once more, this will be nothing however an internal method of referencing two one of a kind kinds of system configurations AMD would love to look OEMs construct. however it'd be outstanding to peer the organisation provide greater steering and less assailable requirements for its Bristol Ridge platform. As we mentioned several months ago, a number of the Carrizo systems you could buy nowadays are essentially configured in methods that don’t make feel for the fee points the hardware was intended to goal.

It’s no longer clear yet which kind of system the HP Envy x360 will end up. Many Carrizo systems have been saddled with terrible overall performance way to single-channel reminiscence configurations and monitors that weren’t nicely-calibrated or had terrible brightness. The fact that HP is presenting a 4K choice appears to indicate we will anticipate higher matters this time around, but we’re going to be patient earlier than passing judgment.

AMD’s CPU and APU divisions are in a hard function. they are able to iterate on Carrizo and supply a few widespread enhancements 12 months-on-12 months, the identical way that Carrizo made fundamental upgrades to Kaveri, specially in video playback electricity consumption. None of this, but, will essentially alter the organisation’s fortunes. Zen, now not Bristol Ridge, is AMD’s one danger to regain at least a number of the floor its lost to Intel over the past five years. without a present day date on while Zen APUs will in reality come to market, Bristol Ridge will have to do what it can to anchor things for the following 18-24 months.