We have another interesting update from the reliable sweclockers.com today. Turns out, the new lineup that will be replacing Kaveri in 2016 is codenamed Bristol Ridge and will be fabricated on the 28nm process. It will have a total of 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores (the same configuration as Kaveri) with Excavator as its processor architecture and an improved GCN as its GPU architecture.

Not an official AMD poster. @Wccftech @AMD

Bristol Ridge Series of APUs to Succeed Kaveri Refresh in 2016

Carrizo, the original successor of Kaveri, will only be landing on mobility platforms (and soldered all in one packages on the desktop side) only and not on the FM2+ socket. What users in this segment will get however, is Kaveri Refresh – the same processor with a more efficient revision of the architecture and some decent upclocks on the CPU and GPU side. This Kaveri Refresh will be codenamed Godavri and will land sometime in the summer. However, if we are talking about a possible FM3+ socket, the scene changes a little. Queue the real Kaveri Successor:

Bristol Ridge on paper appears to be very Carrizo-like in its specifications, however the amount of GCN cores featured in it are likely to remain at 512. As mentioned above the processor architecture will be Excavator while the GPU architecture should be a revised iteration of GCN. There will be 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores. Since we are talking about the 28nm process, dont expect any miracles in terms of performance gains. This will be a decent upgrade to the APU lineup but the real gains will come if AMD shifts to a lower process than 28nm. Interestingly Bristol Ridge should come around the same time as Summit Ridge, which will be on the 14nm node.

However, Bristol Ridge APUs are going to have one very interesting feature: support for DDR4 memory. You might recall how APUs are very dependent on memory, so this is going to be a very nice feature for AMD APUs. However, there is a caveat. I do not know whether AMD plans to support both DDR3 and DDR4 via a dual IMC design or it will support DDR4 only via the standard single IMC. If its the former, than thats absolutely brilliant, but if its the later, I have reservations about this decision. APUs are targeted at the serious budget gamer and though the cost of DDR4 memory should come down by 1H 2016 and will by no means be the cutting edge of memory, it will still remain a relatively expensive solution. However, if we wait till late 2016 or so, memory prices will be very comparable to DDR3. TDP of Bristol Edge is 95W.

Update: Another update from Sweclockers reveals what we have expected from the upcoming AMD chips. The FM3 socket which will be launched with the new Summit Ridge processors will also be able to support the Bristol Ridge family of accelerated processing units. The only difference between both product families is that Bristol Ridge is based on the x86 Excavator core architecture which we will get to see on Carrizo APUs for the mobility platforms while Summit Ridge will fuse the high-performance x86 Zen architecture.