Pre-announcing Bristol Ridge
AMD is calling this a "pre-announcement," a term which reminds me of George Carlin's rant about the abuse of the prefix "pre." Let's just call this an early reminder AMD has new hardware coming down the pipe and a look at what the new chips are capable of. AMD is forecasting an 23% improvement in 3DMark scores, and a 5% improvement in PCMark 8v2.
Those performance gains are easy to explain once you consult the notes at the back of the presentation. AMD's Bristol Ridge was tested using DDR4-1866, while the older Carrizo systems are tapping DDR3-1600. That gives Bristol Ridge a roughly 17% memory bandwidth advantage over Carrizo, and we already know AMD's APUs are almost entirely bandwidth-bound. Toss in a small core clock increase and a bit more top-end CPU frequency, and that's the difference between the two chips.
AMD is also talking up its Cinebench scores, as shown below, but the company's reported baseline benchmarks are a bit off compared to what we've seen in retail. We elected to create our own graph for this data since the slide isn't completely clear.
Data by AMD
AMD's slide claims this data is based on Cinebench 11.5, while the actual footnote says Cinebench R15. R15 is a better fit for the data, so we're going to go with that. Even so, there's an odd discrepancy in the claimed performance of the Kaveri platform. AMD reports a 66.48 in Cinebench R15 -- considerably below the measured performance median of 75 in that benchmark as recorded by Notebookcheck.net(Opens in a new window). The Carrizo scores, in contrast, are exactly in line with what we'd expect from the FX-8800P. Either way, AMD is claiming to have picked up a respectable 14% from Bristol Ridge over and above Carrizo. Higher turbo clocks could easily yield that kind of improvement, though this would also imply the speculation of a 14nm Bristol Ridge was incorrect -- if AMD had actually taken Carrizo down to 14nm, we'd see larger improvements.
New model numbers, hints of a product position
I suspect this last information isn't data AMD intended to include, but its presentation also contains reference to at least one specific Bristol Ridge processor -- an FX-9830P equipped with 8GB of DDR4-2400 RAM. I'm not sure how much weight to put on this, because the same annotation also claims AMD's FX-7600P was tested using 8GB of DDR4, and Kaveri doesn't support that RAM standard.
What's somewhat more interesting is AMD appears to be showcasing different system configurations to OEMs, at least. The annotated slides reference a "Work Faster" configuration (outfitted with a 35W CPU and 8GB of DDR4-2400) as well as a "Play Longer" system (15W CPU with 8GB of DDR4-1866). Again, this may be nothing but an internal method of referencing two different types of system configurations AMD would like to see OEMs build. But it would be great to see the company provide more guidance and firmer requirements for its Bristol Ridge platform. As we discussed several months ago, many of the Carrizo systems you can buy today are fundamentally configured in ways that don't make sense for the price points the hardware was intended to target.
It's not clear yet which kind of system the HP Envy x360 will turn out to be. Many Carrizo systems were saddled with poor performance thanks to single-channel memory configurations and screens that weren't well-calibrated or had poor brightness. The fact that HP is offering a 4K option seems to suggest we can expect better things this time around, but we're going to wait and see before passing judgment.
AMD's CPU and APU divisions are in a difficult position. They can iterate on Carrizo and deliver some significant improvements year-on-year, the same way that Carrizo made major improvements to Kaveri, especially in video playback power consumption. None of this, however, will fundamentally alter the company's fortunes. Zen, not Bristol Ridge, is AMD's one chance to regain at least some of the ground its lost to Intel over the past five years. With no current date on when Zen APUs will actually come to market, Bristol Ridge will have to do what it can to anchor things for the next 18-24 months.
