It appears that AMD's new Zen CPU core architecture will only be available for high-end desktop systems next year, while mainstream market will get it in 2017, as a part of AMD's Raven Ridge APU.

According to the report and leaked roadmap slide posted at Benchlife.info, AMD will first introduce its Bristol Ridge APUs for mainstream PCs next year. AMD Bristol Ridge will be based on Carrizo architecture and feature four Excavator CPU cores and Radeon graphics based on GCN 1.2 architecture. When compared to existing Kaveri lineup, Bristol Rige is expected to offer 10 to 15 percent performance improvement.

When it comes high-end desktop APU market, AMD will have Summit Ridge CPUs which will also be based on FM3 socket and feature up to eight Zen CPU cores. These are also expected to bring dual-channel DDR4 memory support and PCI-Express 3.0 controller. AMD Summit Ridge will be based on 14nm FinFET manufacturing process at GlobalFoundries.

The most interesting is the Raven Ridge platform, which will be based on Zen core architecture and should, at least according to earlier details, offer up to 40 percent performance improvement compared to existing APUs. It will also feature next-gen GCN GPU architecture and have DDR4 memory support and be based on the same AM4 socket.

The last information gathered from the leaked slide is AMD's Stoney Ridge platform aimed at low power APU market and feature two Excavator CPU cores, next-gen GCN GPU architecture and also be based on AM4, FP4 and FT4 packages, which means it will hit mobile market as well.

AMD puts a lot of confidence in its new Zen core architecture and hopefully we will see how good it is by the end of this year.



Source: KitGuru.net.