Bristol Ridge and Stoney Ridge sound a little like locations in a Somerset version of Game of Thrones, but they both feature AMD’s Excavator x86 processor cores and Radeon R7 graphics, which AMD sees powering e-sports gaming on laptops.

Bristol Ridge is the more powerful of the two coming in 35W and 15W versions of AMD FX, A12 and A10 processors, offering up to 3.7GHz of processing power. The former two processors are paired with up to eight Graphics Core Next (GCN) cores in the R7 to provide a decent pool of graphics processing power.

Stoney Bridge offers less in the way of processor power, topping out at 3.5GHz, and versions include 15W A9, A6 and E2 processor configurations coupled with lower powered graphics accelerators.

AMD claimed that the new APUs offer a 50 per cent hike in performance over the previous generation Carrizo APUs. However, this rise is over APUs from the early part of Carrizo’s lifecycle, so performance gains over the most recent Carrizo APUs are likely to be 10 to 20 per cent.

AMD also said that its silicon is faster than rival chips from Intel, including the i3-6100U found in several ultraportable laptops.

Many of these tests are subjective and depend on how a hardware manufacture configures and sets up the APUs in a laptop or tablet, but AMD does have its graphics tech to draw on, such as the GCN architecture, which could give it the edge over Intel’s chips when it comes to pushing pixels.

The APUs will be aimed primarily at slim laptops that need low-power consumption chips, much like Intel’s Skylake line.

Bristol Ridge is currently available to end users only in the form of HP’s latest Envy laptop. But now that AMD has debuted the full range of the seventh-generation APUs we can expect to see them in other ultraportable machines before too long.

Courtesy-TheInq

Hexus spotted Yu Zheng, an R&D Manager at AMD Shanghai had listed the work on Project Greenland as a work experience highlight on his LinkedIn profile page. Greenland is described as “A leading chip of the first graphics IP v9.0 generation, it has full capacity of 4096 shader processor along with whole new SOC v15 architecture.”

The Graphics IP v9.0 designation is thought to signify a Vega GPU in the making. Zheng mentions this is an SOC, but then Hawaii and Fiji chips were described the same. Fiji is part of the graphics IP v8.0 family, as will be Polaris.

Vega following after Polaris, and designated as a ‘HMB2′ GPU by AMD, it looks like Vega based graphics cards will be the successors to the HBM equipped Fiji range such as the Radeon Fury and Nano. Fiju can manage 4096 stream processors,  but with an upgrade to HBM2, 14nm process and other optimisation it is estimated that a Greenland/Vega GPU based graphics cards will offer 20 to 30 per cent better performance.

So with Greenland/Vega sporting HBM2 memory Hexus thinks that Polaris packing graphics cards will therefore feature GDDR5/X memory.

Courtesy-Fud