When AMD launched their new Zen architecture back in May, the firm announced that Zen would arrive for the CPU and APU lines at the same time. According to slides from March that have now been leaked, it looks like AMD might have originally planned for Zen to arrive in 2017, one year later than the current roadmap seen below. Zen would have been pushed back to Raven Ridge, a name that AMD might still keep in their current roadmap.
That wouldn’t have been too surprising given that AMD has had their APUs lag a year behind their CPU and GPU line in the past. The added complexity of the integrating the two parts has meant that there have to be delays. AMDs first APU, the Llano series, launched with Stars K10.5 and Terascale when dedicated chips with Bulldozer and GCN were launching the same year. It would have meant that APU users wouldn’t see the 40% IPC gain AMD is promising with Zen till after 2016. By tightening up their lineup, AMD stands to focus their lineup and make their APUs a better option.
As we now know, AMD is updating their APU line with Excavator for Carrizo. It looks like AMD still thought there were optimizations left for Bulldozer as Excavator was set to get a refresh in 2016. Despite a somewhat disappointing launch, steady updates have improved the architecture. Nethertheless, Zen will mark a significant improvement that AMD fans can look forward to.
When it’s all said and done though, this is still just an unconfirmed leak no matter well the info meshes with what we know and expect. It if is real, it looks like there was some serious changes done internally to bring Zen tot eh APU line early. Given this type of long-term planning exhibited, it’s unlikely AMD will shed any divisions, especially the core CPU and GPU business.
Thank you Benchlife for the information
