AMD starts shipping 7th-Gen Bristol Ridge APUs to PC makers

AMD has Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs in its sights with new APUs

AMD has announced that its 7th-generation A-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) have started shipping to PC makers and will be incorporated into forthcoming devices from HP and Lenovo, among others, soon.

The APUs, which have either Radeon R5 or R7 graphics chips built in, will be used in a wide range of super-slim laptops, two-in-one devices and desktop PCs, claimed AMD. Customers for the chip, codenamed Bristol Ridge, include HP and Lenovo.

Bristol Ridge is intended to challenge Intel's newly released Kaby Lake offering, and has up to four Excavator x86 CPU cores. It covers a power band spanning from 35W to 65W.

The microprocessor cores incorporate AMD's Radeon R5 or R7 graphics chips in order to give the APUs the graphics power for online gaming and high-definition video streaming in a cost-effective package.

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.