AMD starts shipping 7th-generation Bristol Ridge APUs

AMD takes on Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs

Chip designer AMD has announced that its 7th-generation A-Series microprocessors are shipping to PC makers, and will soon appear in super-slim laptops, two-in-one devices and desktop PCs from vendors including HP and Lenovo.

The Bristol Ridge chips are intended to challenge Intel's new Kaby Lake offering, and have up to four Excavator x86 CPU cores with a power band spanning 35W to 65W.

The microprocessor cores are coupled with AMD's Radeon R7 or R5 graphics chips, which the company said gives the APUs enough graphics power for smooth online gaming and high-definition streaming.

AMD said earlier this year that Bristol Ridge provides a 50 per cent improvement in CPU performance over the Kaveri APU released in 2014, and a 10 per cent hike over the Carrizo generation released last year.

The performance boost over the previous generation comes mostly from Bristol Ridge's access to a DDR4 memory controller, which gives the APU a greater memory bandwidth over the DDR3-sporting Carrizo.

AMD claimed that the new APU offers up to 99 per cent better graphics performance than Intel's Core i5 6000 chip and "equivalent productivity performance".

AMD also said that the 7th-Gen A-Series desktop microprocessors will support 4K video playback in H.264 and H.265 formats, Microsoft Direct X12 and peripherals including PCIe Gen 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, NVMe and SATA Express.

Kevin Lensing, corporate vice president and general manager of client computing at AMD, said: "The consumer release of these new HP and Lenovo designs is an important milestone for AMD on two fronts.

"First, it marks a major increase in productivity performance, streaming video and e-sports gaming experiences sought after by today's consumers, delivered through our new 7th-Generation AMD A-Series desktop processors.

"Second, because these new OEM designs also feature our new AM4 desktop platform, the motherboard ecosystem shows its readiness for our upcoming high-performance Summit Ridge desktop CPUs featuring Zen cores, which share the same platform."

AMD is already gearing up to release Zen, the firm's next-generation desktop CPU architecture.