December 18, 2024

AMD is getting ready to unveil its 7th Generation APU lineup at Computex in a few weeks.The brand new processors will be landing in June along with the AM4 motherboards and will be the first to feature Excavator on the mainstream desktop platform.

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50% Faster Than Kaveri

All six SKUs fall into the full power (65W) or low power (35W) variants. All SKUs utilize the AM4 socket and support DDR4-2400 memory. It is worth noting that the boards supporting the AM4 socket will be landing next month in June. AMD will be revealing the platform at Computex in a few days and we expect to see the entire lineup of AMD’s 7th Generation APUs present there as well.

  • The flagship SKUs will have a total of 12 compute cores present on the package. Out of these, 4 will belong to the Compute side while the remaining 8 will form the Graphics side. The top end SKU will have 4 x86 Excavator based cores clocked at 3.7 Ghz (Turbo up to 4.2 Ghz) with 2 MB L2 Cache. This will be complimented by 8 GCN 3.0 CUs for a total of 512 Streaming Processors. The low power (35W) variant will be clocked at 2.9 Ghz (boost up to 3.8 Ghz).
  • The performance tier SKUs in the lineup will have a total of 10 compute cores – divided into 4 for compute and 6 for graphics respectively. The x86 Excavator based cores will be clocked at 3.5 Ghz (Boost up to 3.8 Ghz) with 2 MB of L2 cache. The 6 graphics CUs house 384 GCN 3.0 cores. Clock rate of the GPU side of things is not known to us at the moment. The low power variant (35W) will be clocked at 2.8 Ghz (Boost up to 3.5 Ghz).
  • The budget SKUs in the lineup will have a total of 6 Compute Cores. The two x86 Excavator based cores will be clocked at 3.5 Ghz (Boost up to 3.8 Ghz) and will share 1 MB of L2 cache. The graphics side of things will house 4 CUs with 256 GCN 3.0 stream processors. The low power variant (35 W) will be clocked at 3.0 Ghz (boost up to 3.4 Ghz)AMD-Bristol-Ridge-APU-Notebook_IPC-635x357

    AMD-Bristol-Ridge-APU-Notebook_Performance-635x357

                   AMD’s new Excavator APUs offer 50% more performance than their predecessor.


    The amount of GCN cores featured maxes out at 512. The processor architecture will be Excavator while the GPU architecture should be a revised iteration of GCN (dubbed GCN 3.0). Bristol Ridge APUs are going to have one very interesting feature: support for DDR4 memory, specifically dual channel DDR4 2400 Mhz.APUs are very dependent on memory, so this is going to be a very nice feature for AMD’s  new APUs.

    Gaming performance increase is stated to be around 20% of Carrizo Mobility and over 50% of Kaveri! The APU will have full HSA support and OpenCL 2.0. It will also have the AZ/I2S Audio Co-processor on board for sound processing.

    The chipset is ofcourse Promontory. Its worth mentioning that Summit Ridge is at the 14nm node while as Bristol Ridge is still at 28nm. So all that while remaining on the old and trusty 28nm process is quite a feat.

    AMD’s next generation Bristol Ridge’s Excavator cores will have high clock rates which means that performance gains will be architectural in nature as well as the usual clock advantage. Clock for clock comparison with Kaveri should be very interesting.