Published in PC Hardware

AMD shows off Bristol Ridge

by on05 April 2016


Taking on Skylake

AMD has been giving a sneak preview of its “Bristol Ridge” architecture which it hope to use to take on Skylake.

Bristol Ridge series of chips will formally debut on May 31, at the Computex show in Taiwan when it will be part of product announcement from the OEMs. However the plan is that AMD’s 7th-generation APU, Bristol Ridge, will improve on its older processors and be competitive with Skylake.

AMD showed an integrated APU running in HP’s Envy x360 laptop and claimed it outperform Intel’s Core i7-6500U microprocessor in 3D graphics. Bristol Ridge should be about 40 percent faster than the Kaveri APU AMD shipped in 2014.

Bristol Ridge is built around four “Bulldozer” CPU cores and eight GPU cores. AMD will ship both quad-core and dual-core versions of Bristol Ridge and eventually a desktop version of Bristol Ridge as well as a low-power, 15-watt version. Bristol Ridge and its predecessor, Carrizo, use the same 28nm process technology but the process has been tweaked to provide more efficient transistors and a technology called adaptive voltage frequency scaling. This managed to increase clock speed.

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By the end of the year, AMD will have moved on, to both its Zen CPU core as well as the Polaris graphics architecture. If it does not work then AMD will probably disappear, having been bought out by someone who wants its patents.

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Last modified on 05 April 2016
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