Published in PC Hardware

Zen APU will have a Polaris GPU

by on05 July 2016


Exclusive: Comes in 2017

AMD’s CEO Lisa Su said both publicly and to Fudzilla exclusively that its desktop Zen comes first, followed by server, notebook and embedded products. We have some exclusive news about the first Zen based APU that will come with four Zen cores and Polaris graphics. 

There will be many versions of the Zen but the one that caught our eyes has four Zen CPU cores and up to 11 GCN cores. This will result with an APU for notebooks as well as embedded systems with up to 704 stream cores.

The Zen part of the APU has four Zen cores each having 512KB cache plus the 8 MB shared L3 cache. This is a standard configuration for Zen cores. Since Zen supports DDR4, this APU will also run on DDR4 up to 3200 speed. Some versions will even support Ecc memory.

The next generation GPU and multimedia core supports H.265 10-bit encode and decode, something that we see with introduction of Polaris 10 Radeon RX480 and RX 470. The Zen APU graphics will be closer to a Polaris 10, RX460 core but obviously with less stream processors. This will be one of the fastest, if not the fastest APU ever for notebooks and even for consoles and embedded.

The same GPU can also decode VP9 as well as up to four DisplayPort 1.3s, an HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.4. matched with a next generation chipset there will be a few new tricks you will see from Zen APU including USB 3.1 including USB Type-C, NVMe.

All this can be done with Thermal Design Power (TDPs) ranging between 45 and 65W for the socket AM4 version. An embedded version of such an APU will be able to have TDPs as low as 12 to 45W. one can expect Zen APU to start selling this APU in 2017 but we cannot get better data than that.

Last modified on 05 July 2016
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