7th Generation AMD A-Series desktop PC systems start to ship

[HEXUS]

'Bristol Ridge' APUs will be available in HP and Lenovo AM4 platform PC systems soon.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

The above will be joined by an as-yet unnamed 'enthusiast' level chipset.

My money's on "X370". A bit boring perhaps, but it follows AMD's usual pattern on these things. EDIT: I notice the slide lists "X/B/A300" chipset for SFF options, which doesn't seem to provide any additional ports at all... so it looks like the additional chip is entirely optional and you can build a board to run the SoC "bare", as it were...

I know the PCIe x8 limit is internal to the Bristol Ridge APU rather than being platform dependent ... wonder how many lanes the platform as a whole can cope with? I sincerely hope it's a lot more than 8...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That A12 9800 looks pretty nice - 3.8GHZ to 4.2GHZ clockspeeds for the CPU and around 1.1GHZ for the GPU core!!

So when is it being released for DIY PC builders together with socket AM4??

[scaryjim]

... So when is it being released for DIY PC builders together with socket AM4??

I have a horrid feeling it might not be, although at least with products at OEM it might give mobo manufacturers a bit more confidence that they can deliver a decent desktop experience - I'm actually pretty impressed by what they've acheived in the 65W envelope there.

Wonder how fast the memory controller can go... 512 shaders @ 1100MHz is just begging for 3GHz+ memory... iirc the 7750 launched with 4500MHz GDDR5 which gives you a good idea of how much bandwidth AMD think it needed...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have a horrid feeling it might not be, although at least with products at OEM it might give mobo manufacturers a bit more confidence that they can deliver a decent desktop experience - I'm actually pretty impressed by what they've acheived in the 65W envelope there.

Wonder how fast the memory controller can go... 512 shaders @ 1100MHz is just begging for 3GHz+ memory... iirc the 7750 launched with 4500MHz GDDR5 which gives you a good idea of how much bandwidth AMD think it needed...

There were HD7750 GDDR3 models IIRC??

I wonder if the IGP uses the colour compression technology seen in AMD GCN1.2 GPUs onwards?? So combine that with GDDR4,it might help a bit.

Kaveri lacks it,so it will be interesting to see how the A10 7860K and A10 7890K fare in comparison.

[scaryjim]

There were HD7750 GDDR3 models IIRC??

Yeah, but they were quite a bit slower iirc. Still, even 2400MHz DDR4 would provide more memory bandwidth than they had...!

... I wonder if the IGP uses the colour compression technology seen in AMD GCN1.2 GPUs onwards?? So combine that with GDDR4,it might help a bit.

Kaveri lacks it,so it will be interesting to see how the A10 7860K and A10 7890K fare in comparison.

AFAIK that's a feature of the GCN generation, and Bristol Ridge is meant to use 3rd gen like Tonga so should get some benefit from DCC - although not the latest version that Polaris uses. Given the increased clock speed, potential bandiwdth increase with DDR4, and colour compression, I suspect we'll see a healthy increase in IGP performance compared to Kaveri...

[The Hand]

We could infer the Zen based APUs next year will be 95w judging by these.

[scaryjim]

Yeah, but they were quite a bit slower iirc. ...

Apparently I recalled correctly: https://www.goldfries.com/computing/...adeon-hd-7750/

Compares a DDR3 7750 to a GDDR5 one ... and for some reason clocks the GDDR5 one down to 800MHz (3200MHz effective) from 1150MHz (4600Mhz effective)

Anyway, for anyone who can't be bothered to follow the link; shifting from GDDR5 3200 to DDR3 1600, performance drops around 30%. I imagine that'd be more like 40% if the GDDR5 version had been run at its proper memory clock. And that's a 512 shader GPU @ 800MHz ... add a couple of generations of throughput improvement and almost 40% extra clock speed ....

Yeah, get fast enough memory running on that APU and it's going to FLY!

[sykobee]

I've read rumours that the DDR4 controller on BR may be able to go over 3 GHz. Vague rumours that I now cannot link to, but I remember them. Also note that BR's GPU supports colour compression like Tonga, so that will help a bit.

A320 is a bit Airbus.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yeah, but they were quite a bit slower iirc. Still, even 2400MHz DDR4 would provide more memory bandwidth than they had...!



AFAIK that's a feature of the GCN generation, and Bristol Ridge is meant to use 3rd gen like Tonga so should get some benefit from DCC - although not the latest version that Polaris uses. Given the increased clock speed, potential bandiwdth increase with DDR4, and colour compression, I suspect we'll see a healthy increase in IGP performance compared to Kaveri...

The GDDR3 version was much slower:

https://www.goldfries.com/computing/...adeon-hd-7750/

The GDDR5 version was around 40% to 50% faster in the games tested.

Its a shame if AMD does not release them since Kaby Lake will up IGP performance even more for Intel and Kaveri lacks H265 support,etc. Plus FM2+ has no real upgrade path and its hard to recommend now unless you are doing a more basic build.

[jigger]

We could infer the Zen based APUs next year will be 95w judging by these.

I suppose it would depend on the performance and chip placement. This chip is 28nm and the Zen APU will be 14nm and both are very different designs from what I can tell. An 8 core 16 thread Zen APU might be 95watts

[EndlessWaves]

IIRC GDDR3 was ditched with the 5000 series, neither the 6000 nor 7000 series used it. The 7750 was DDR3 or GDDR5.

That's an interesting feature split between CPU/SoC and chipset. Intel's diagrams always show that everything except the PCI-E 16x link goes via chipset and DMI?

Is that a real difference or stuff concealed for marketing?

[jigger]

Skylake i5 CPU performance with much better graphics performance sounds very promising. Summit Ridge could be epic.

[ET3D]

So when is it being released for DIY PC builders together with socket AM4??

As rumour has it, next month. I do hope it's more than just token availability.

I also hope that AMD prices it reasonably. I don't see it as out of the question for them to price it at $200 or £180 as competition to the Core i5 6500 mentioned in the slides. I hope they'd price it lower. (Because let's face it, AMD cherry picks its benchmarks. The A12-9800 won't be anywhere close to the Core i5 6500 for any practical purposes.)

I also hope for some low priced A320 microATX motherboards. That chipset + Bristol Ridge combination doesn't sound half bad. Motherboards would likely have 4 USB 3 ports at the back + 2 front + one USB-C (10Gb/s) at the back. Combined with 4 SATA, 1 SATA Express and NVMe. All in all, looks well rounded enough to last me for a while.

[jigger]

For me more rides on what the AM4 motherboards offer than the raw performance of the chips.

[Sam C.]

When will desktop CPU come i wonder maybe next year.