AMD Confirms Raven Ridge Will Use Ryzen Branding

While AMD is well known for their CPUs and their GPUs, they are also well known for the APU lineup. Born from the merger of ATI and AMD over a decade ago, the APUs combine the GPU and CPU portions onto a single die. Just as the CPU lineup suffered from Bulldozer, so has the APUs as well, With the launch of Ryzen, AMD has a chance to make a resurgence in the market and we’ve gotten some more details to share with you.

According to a recent reddit AMA, AMD confirmed some key details for Raven Ridge, their upcoming APU lineup. Replacing the current 7th Gen Bristol Ridge, the 8th generation APUs feature Zen based processors combined with next-gen graphics. This means either Polaris or Vega depending on timing. The new lineup will use the 14nm process just like Ryzen and arrive sometime in 2H 2017.

One surprising change compared to the previous APU generations is the change in branding. Since the days of Llano, the APUs use the Ax moniker, like A12, A10, A8 and so forth. Starting with Raven Ridge, AMD is planning to fold them into the Ryzen branding scheme. We saw the first glimpse of that with the new Ryzen naming guide with the G and S suffixes denoting chips with iGPUs. It seems that AMDs plan went beyond what we thought were just simple iGPUs, with even full-fledged APUs joining Ryzen.

With a unified brand, AMD will be better able to conduct marketing and build up a market presence. It also makes sense now that both the APUs and CPUs share the same AM4 socket and 300 series chipsets. It will be interesting to see how AMD’s APUs fare with both a competitive CPU and GPU portion for once.