AMD said on Monday that desktops powered with its seventh-generation Bristol Ridge Pro Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are available to purchase. These desktops target businesses rather than mainstream consumers, packing lots of computing and graphics performance into a small, energy-efficient chip. These Pro chips can be found in several desktop solutions from HP and Lenovo such that the former company’s new EliteDesk 705 G3 Series desktops and the latter’s ThinkCentre M79 desktop.
AMD’s seventh-generation Pro APU lineup currently consists of seven chips: two A12 units, two A10 units, one A8 unit, and two A6 units. The chips consume between 35 watts and 65 watts of power, depending on the APU, and support DDR4 memory clocked at 2,400MHz. The two A6 APUs provide Radeon R5 graphics while the remaining five sport Radeon R7 graphics. Here is a quick chart:
| A12-9800 | A12-9800E | A10-9700 | A10-9700E | A8-9600 | A6-9500 | A6-9500E | |
| Graphics | Radeon R7 |
Radeon R7 |
Radeon R7 |
Radeon R7 |
Radeon R7 |
Radeon R5 |
Radeon R5 |
| CPU cores | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| Base clock | 3.8GHz | 3.1GHz | 3.5GHz | 3GHz | 3.1GHz | 3.5GHz | 3GHz |
| Boost clock | 4.2GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.5GHz | 3.4GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.4GHz |
| GPU cores | 8 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 4 |
| GPU clock speed | 1,108MHz | 900MHz | 1,029MHz | 847MHz | 900MHz | 1,029MHz | 800MHz |
| TDP | 65 watts | 35 watts | 45/65 watts | 35 watts | 45/65 watts | 45/65 watts | 35 watts |
That is just for starters, of course. AMD’s prior sixth-generation family of A-Series Pro APU’s consisted of 11 chips spanning from the quad-core A12-8870 APU to the A4-8350B dual-core APU. When comparing the new A12-9800 to the older A12-8870, the newer chip has a slightly faster base clock speed and support for HDMI 2.0 instead of HDMI 1.4. Otherwise, the two seem to consist of the same number of CPU and GPU cores, the same boost clock speed, the same GPU clock speed, and the same thermal envelope.
Systems that now feature AMD’s seventh-generation A-Series Pro APUs include:
HP
Lenovo
- ThinkCentre M79
Right now, the EliteDesk 705 G3 models are not listed on HP’s website, but rather the older G2 generation instead. A quick look at Lenovo’s ThinkCentre M79 product page reveals an older model also packing AMD APU’s up to an A10-7800B, which is actually a fourth-generation Kaveri product released in 2014. Needless to say, Lenovo seemed to be in dire need of refreshing this particular business-oriented desktop for quite a while.
“In the past two years we made incredible progress in the commercial client segment. Since its inception in mid-2014, AMD PRO processor unit shipments increased more than 45 percent, enabling businesses all over the world to simplify IT with secure, high performance, reliable solutions” said Jim Anderson, AMD senior vice president and general manager, Computing and Graphics Business.
The new seventh-generation APUs fit into AMD’s new AM4 socket for consumer and business-focused processors. What is great about this socket is that it works with both traditional CPUs and APUs, enabling customers to easily update their processor or APU to products based on AMD’s next-generation Zen core architecture in 2017. The AM4 platform for business is based on AMD’s X/B/A300 motherboard chipsets.
