Leaked AMD roadmap shows consumption of 4 to 35 watts for mobile Zen apus

Roadmaps have appeared online that provide more information about the consumption of the AMD Zen apus for mobile devices and the variants for desktops. The Raven Ridge APUs for laptops and all-in-ones have up to four cores with eight threads.

The roadmaps were posted on the SemiAccurate forum and appear to be from AMD. The diagram shows that the Raven Ridge FP5 APUs for laptops and PhD students will come in 2017 and are equipped with a maximum of sixteen ‘compute cores’, AMD classifies both the CPU and GPU cores under this heading. The sixteen-core configuration consists of four AMD Zen cores, which together can handle eight threads, and twelve graphics cores, with 64 stream processors each. Economical APUs will appear with a consumption of 4 watts up to a maximum of 35 watts. The economical variants will be equipped with fewer compute cores, but it is not yet known in which configurations AMD will make the APUs.

The roadmap also shows information about the Raven Ridge APUs with an AM4 socket, which can be used in desktop computers and which follow the current APUs in the AMD A-series. These come in variants with a TDP of 35 to 95 watts. The most powerful variants will have four Zen cores with eight threads, combined with twelve graphics cores.

The AMD Zen Summit Ridge CPUs for the AM4 socket, which do not have graphics cores, get a maximum of eight cores and sixteen threads and a TDP of 65 to 95 watts. These processors will be the successors to the current AMD FX models.

All Zen processors for desktops use a new chipset, which AMD codes Promontory. The chipset supports USB 3.1, NVME SSDs and SATA Express. This year AM4 motherboards with this chipset will appear, in combination with new Bristol Ridge APUs. These chips still use the old Excavator cores, which are baked at 28nm.

Both roadmaps indicate that AMD Zen processors and APUs will hit the market in 2017. A release at the end of 2016, which was previously hinted at, seems to be out of the question. AMD is expected to show its Zen products at the CES electronics show in January, when Intel shows its next-generation Kaby Lake.