AM4 gets APUs (Not Vega ones)

[Ezio Auditore]

You can find the original article here

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The focus for AMD’s AM4 platform is to span a wide range of performance and price points. We’ve had the launch of the Ryzen CPU family, featuring quad cores up to octa-cores with the new Zen microarchitecture, but AM4 was always designed to be a platform that merges CPUs and integrated graphics. We’re still waiting for the new Zen cores in products like Ryzen to find their way down into the desktop in the form of the Raven Ridge family, however those parts are going through the laptop stack first and will likely appear on the desktop either at the end of the year or in Q1 next year. Until then, users get to play with Bristol Ridge, originally released back in September 2016, but finally making its way to retail.

The SKU list is here:

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The eight  APUs and three CPUs being launched f spans from a high-frequency A12 part to the A6, and they all build on the Bristol Ridge notebook parts that were launched in 2016. AMD essentially skipped the 6th Gen, Carrizo, for desktop as the Carrizo design was significantly mobile focused.Using the updated 28nm process from TSMC, AMD was able to tweak the microarchitecture and allow full on APUs for desktops using a similar design.

 

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The table of 'as many specifications as we could get our hands on' is as follows:

The integrated GPU:

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For the A-series parts, integrated graphics is the name of the game. AMD configures the integrated graphics in terms of Compute Units (CUs), with each CU having 64 streaming processors (SPs) using GCN 1.3 (aka GCN 3.0) architecture, the same architecture as found in AMD’s R9 Fury line of GPUs. The lowest processor in the stack, the A6-9500E, will have four CUs for 256 SPs, and the A12 APUs will have eight CUs, for 512 SPs. The other processors will have six CUs for 384 SPs, and in each circumstance the higher TDP processor typically has the higher base and turbo frequency.

And a benchmark(So you get an idea of how things are currently):

 

 

 

[You_are_a_cunt]

Those benchmarks, though O_O

Entry level AMD builds with performance that surpasses even an i7? WHAT IS THIS, 2001?!

[porina]

Not Ryzen CPU, not Polaris (Vega is a bit of a stretch!). It'll have its place in very low cost systems but we have to wait some more before APUs get really interesting.

[Sakkura]

9 minutes ago, revsilverspine said:

Those benchmarks, though O_O

Entry level AMD builds with performance that surpasses even an i7? WHAT IS THIS, 2001?!

Only because Intel puts a low-end iGPU on most of its desktop mainstream i7s. If there was a Core i7-5775C in the chart, it would be at the top.

[You_are_a_cunt]

1 minute ago, Sakkura said:

Only because Intel puts a low-end iGPU on most of its desktop mainstream i7s. If there was a Core i7-5775C in the chart, it would be at the top.

A $360-something CPU pretty much puts you in mid-high level range. Most low-mid spec builds that I build are like $600 tops, and that's with a GPU that's fairly weak (beefier than iGPU though).

The APUs could open up the door for $400 builds easily

[Ezio Auditore]

If AMD gets the pricing right, the G4560 might not remain the ultimate super-low budget king.

[Taf the Ghost]

Funny thing is these have actually been available since about December, but only from OEMs in China and Germany, apparently. I'm honestly surprised we got a consumer-level launch given "Raven Ridge" isn't that far away.  Oh well.

[Sakkura]

1 hour ago, revsilverspine said:

A $360-something CPU pretty much puts you in mid-high level range. Most low-mid spec builds that I build are like $600 tops, and that's with a GPU that's fairly weak (beefier than iGPU though).

The APUs could open up the door for $400 builds easily

Right, that's what was so weird about Intel's strategy. A strong iGPU would make more sense on a cheaper CPU - the $100-150 range that AMD is targeting now. Or maybe a little higher if the GPU is strong enough, so maybe Raven Ridge will come in around $200. More than that though, and the concept falls apart.

[Prysin]

1 hour ago, Sakkura said:

Only because Intel puts a low-end iGPU on most of its desktop mainstream i7s. If there was a Core i7-5775C in the chart, it would be at the top.

eh, depends. Usually the i5 and i7 Broadwell Crystal Well parts are very close due to iGPU being the limit. iGPU is limited by memory bandwidth 

[porina]

21 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Right, that's what was so weird about Intel's strategy. A strong iGPU would make more sense on a cheaper CPU - the $100-150 range that AMD is targeting now. Or maybe a little higher if the GPU is strong enough, so maybe Raven Ridge will come in around $200. More than that though, and the concept falls apart.

The Broadwell with Crystalwell desktop CPUs were an anomaly on their road map. It was really late and they only launched desktop parts to say they launched it at all. The extra L4 eDRAM is what gave it a graphics boost. Although they never implemented it on desktop Skylake, there is similar available on mobile Skylake and where suitably equipped it is even faster than Broadwell. Even in mobile, they were only on high end CPUs. I think the cost of implementing it the way they did precludes it from low cost parts. 

[Guest]

In the grand theft auto V benchmarks, the AMD A10-7800 outperforms all of the intel chips below it which seems bad for intel in terms of performance considering their chips are priced higher. Even though the APU's are priced cheaper, they still outperform the intel chips. I think that the reason for this is because AMD is using a different marketing strategy to intel because the intel chips could do well in terms of achieving higher clockspeeds or other benchmarks such as cinabench, but when it comes to gaming with the integrated GPU's, AMD boost their sales with providing low power consuming CPU's with good GPU's increasing gaming performance in terms of fps.

[Nena Trinity]

Does these Athlons do much better than the FM2+ ones?

[mach]

59 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Right, that's what was so weird about Intel's strategy. A strong iGPU would make more sense on a cheaper CPU - the $100-150 range that AMD is targeting now. Or maybe a little higher if the GPU is strong enough, so maybe Raven Ridge will come in around $200. More than that though, and the concept falls apart.

Yes. I think intel should put the best gpu on i3 or lower.

The igpu on my 6700 has never been used and will stay unused in the future.

[Sakkura]

27 minutes ago, Prysin said:

eh, depends. Usually the i5 and i7 Broadwell Crystal Well parts are very close due to iGPU being the limit. iGPU is limited by memory bandwidth 

The GPU in the 5775C was higher clocked than in the 5675C. And the L4 cache was there to (partially) alleviate memory bottlenecking.

25 minutes ago, porina said:

The Broadwell with Crystalwell desktop CPUs were an anomaly on their road map. It was really late and they only launched desktop parts to say they launched it at all. The extra L4 eDRAM is what gave it a graphics boost. Although they never implemented it on desktop Skylake, there is similar available on mobile Skylake and where suitably equipped it is even faster than Broadwell. Even in mobile, they were only on high end CPUs. I think the cost of implementing it the way they did precludes it from low cost parts. 

It's far from just the L4 cache that gave it a graphics boost; the fact that it was a GT3 (well, GT3e) configuration with 48 EUs was more important. And Broadwell was not the first time they used an L4 cache for iGPU performance. The Core i5-4670R and Core i5-4770R had it too. Most of their other mainstream desktop CPUs use a GT2 iGPU with half as many EUs.

[Sakkura]

7 minutes ago, mach said:

Yes. I think intel should put the best gpu on i3 or lower.

The igpu on my 6700 has never been used and will stay unused in the future.

Now that they've moved to hyperthreaded Pentiums, maybe they could use stronger iGPUs as the main differentiator between Pentiums and Core i3s.

 

Not that I fully expect them to do that, but it would be a reasonable option.

[Dabombinable]

*Sees a Bulldozer derivative on Ryzen's AM4* fuck off with that BS, give use something that isn't shit (aka something based on Ryzen).

[SkilledRebuilds]

Its unfortunate Dual-GPU's are eventually going extinct (in a sense), hardware and software support is dying out more and more over time...

 

I was hoping for Dual-Socket APU's in Hybrid Xfire for HTPC/Gaming uses.

[Dabombinable]

A12 9800 review:
https://us.hardware.info/reviews/7207/amd-a12-9800-bristol-ridge-apu-socket-am4-review

[Herman Mcpootis]

IIRC i saw these am4 APUs on taobao a few weeks/months ago, not sure why it took so long to be released here but i wouldn't recommend it unless it's really cheap.

[porina]

53 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

It's far from just the L4 cache that gave it a graphics boost; the fact that it was a GT3 (well, GT3e) configuration with 48 EUs was more important. And Broadwell was not the first time they used an L4 cache for iGPU performance. The Core i5-4670R and Core i5-4770R had it too. Most of their other mainstream desktop CPUs use a GT2 iGPU with half as many EUs.

Good points. I never really looked into it. I had got the fastest Intel GPU score for TimeSpy on another forum with an i5-5675C heavily overclocked and with fast ram, but this was later beaten by a mobile i7-6670HQ, with 48 and 72 EUs respectively. I now wonder how much that eDRAM helped, and the only comparable configuration EU differing by eDRAM is the 6000 series.

[AshleyAshes]

Without Vega or Polaris though, have the GPUs in these chips been updated with HEVC decoding support?  Without a feature like that, these would be some sup-par chips in a lot of uses.

[Drak3]

The only new aspect is general release to the public. They've been available in prebuilt systems on AM4 boards before Ryzen's release.

[The Benjamins]

11 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Without Vega or Polaris though, have the GPUs in these chips been updated with HEVC decoding support?  Without a feature like that, these would be some sup-par chips in a lot of uses.

they are excavator APU's. basically just trying to get rid of old supply.

 

in Q4 we should see Zen/Vega APU's for mobile and in Q1 2018 for desktop. (according to road map)

[Notional]

Do remember that these APU's aren't Ryzen based. Next year we should see Ryzen/Vega based APU's. Imagine one of those in a laptop. Would make an excellent gaming laptop at much better prices than currently.

[paddy-stone]

2 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

Without Vega or Polaris though, have the GPUs in these chips been updated with HEVC decoding support?  Without a feature like that, these would be some sup-par chips in a lot of uses.

Yes, according to the article below, these have been updated to include h.265 and VP9 decoding at hardware level.

 

3 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

A12 9800 review:
https://us.hardware.info/reviews/7207/amd-a12-9800-bristol-ridge-apu-socket-am4-review