AMD Zen APU Featuring HBM Spotted

shankly1985 · 1 Jan 2016 at 22:25

This could be something to look out for.. I just recently built a APU system for Xmas present and had a play about with it and was blown away just how good this little system was handling games.

APU was A10 7870k I had to do my research and found out that the faster the RAM speed the better the frame rates so I also added 8GB 1866 speed games like Tomb Raider @720p Medium/High settings it was locked 60fps

With ZEN using HBM this could be a real killer in the mid range gaming. Will APUs become the Future of PC graphic? PS4 and Xbox One both use Modified APUs they can be very powerful..

http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-hbm-apu-spotted/

Panos · 1 Jan 2016 at 22:54

shankly1985 said:
This could be something to look out for.. I just recently built a APU system for Xmas present and had a play about with it and was blown away just how good this little system was handling games.

APU was A10 7870k I had to do my research and found out that the faster the RAM speed the better the frame rates so I also added 8GB 1866 speed games like Tomb Raider @720p Medium/High settings it was locked 60fps

With ZEN using HBM this could be a real killer in the mid range gaming. Will APUs become the Future of PC graphic? PS4 and Xbox One both use Modified APUs they can be very powerful..

http://wccftech.com/amd-zen-hbm-apu-spotted/

Looks like it. Especially considering that the Zen IPC CPU is more powerful by 40%+ than the current ones, and the GPU going to be probably in par with the 7970 if not 290. Adding HBM on top, going to be pretty damn powerful.

And I used a A10 7870 when on my holidays, pretty nice setup for playing games at 1080p TV, like SWTOR and 4+ year old games. Good one

Scougar · 1 Jan 2016 at 22:54

How come you didn't get 2400mhz ram?

The 7850\70k does really well with games; for casual play it is awesome. It is when you get to the graphically demanding games where there are problems. For 720p it is great though.

Mauller · 1 Jan 2016 at 22:54

I think even a cpu with HBM as a level 4 cache could see a decent performance boost regardless of it being used for GPU. The slowest and most power costly part for processing is the memory system.

Boomstick777 · 1 Jan 2016 at 22:58

Ya, future APU's will finally be able to play games well at 1080P. Which will be great but the next monitor standard will become 4K. Also VR requires a ton of horsepower. I imagine APU's will be a longs ways before be able to pull off 4K, so dedicated graphics aren't going anywhere for a long time yet. For budget systems though, laptops, Steam Boxes etc APU's could have a big market.

Mtom · 1 Jan 2016 at 22:58

Now this should work as an APU should from the beginning. Powerful GPU thanks to 14nm, and plenty of bandwith thanks to HBM.

Mauller · 1 Jan 2016 at 23:06

Considering that DDR4 3200 has a bus speed of 25GB/s. This APU with one stack of HBM at 125GB/s has it long beat. Although you can get 100GB/s if it was quad channel, but then you have other latency issues which the single stack of HBM won't. Plus the HBM is Bit readable with asynchronus refresh, reducing latency further.

So TL;DR it gonna be fast son.

Lokken86 · 2 Jan 2016 at 00:06

Panos said:
Looks like it. Especially considering that the Zen IPC CPU is more powerful by 40%+ than the current ones, and the GPU going to be probably in par with the 7970 if not 290. Adding HBM on top, going to be pretty damn powerful.

And I used a A10 7870 when on my holidays, pretty nice setup for playing games at 1080p TV, like SWTOR and 4+ year old games. Good one

I don't think it's going to be quite as powerful as that. Perhaps around 370 level which would be amazing imo.

Gregster · 2 Jan 2016 at 00:27

Zen being a CPU or have I missed summit?

Mauller · 2 Jan 2016 at 00:34

Gregster said:
Zen being a CPU or have I missed summit?

Zen being the CPU uArch being use in these APU's that are going to have HBM L4 cache.

shankly1985 · 2 Jan 2016 at 01:26

Scougar said:
How come you didn't get 2400mhz ram?

The 7850\70k does really well with games; for casual play it is awesome. It is when you get to the graphically demanding games where there are problems. For 720p it is great though.

Tight budget of 300 quid.

r7slayer · 2 Jan 2016 at 02:08

Gregster said:
Zen being a CPU or have I missed summit?

CPU Architecture. So this APU is using the same CPU architecture as the talked about CPU your referring to... From my understandings anyways

meldarthx · 2 Jan 2016 at 08:39

Shankly1985 most never used apu and don't realize just how solid they actually are.

Both my kids systems are apus; I snagged 7670k for upgrade to 6600k; no reason to get the 7700k with that now out as pretty much the same apu but 7670k slightly faster

they play mindcraft; WoT; Aion; guildwars 2; and bunch of other games it handles everything extremely solidly at 1440 by 900......and these are at stock; I haven't oced them yet.....

Though do have to replace damn asus mb as it won't run the new processors; part of the bad batch that came out a couple years ago....Zen apu will rock; that will be something I'll look to upgrade their apus systems to.

Will mean full rebuilds to am4; but I can deal with that

Panos · 2 Jan 2016 at 09:06

Gregster said:
Zen being a CPU or have I missed summit?

Zen is the name of the architecture (IPC, technology).

There are going to be both Enthusiast (FX) series without GPU, and standard APUs. And was a presentation about the Zen APUs that basically going to have Greenland based GPU with similar power to R9 290.

bru · 2 Jan 2016 at 10:29

Thread title is a tad misleading, I thought an actual chip had been spotted not just some literature on one. Also shouldn't this be in the CPU section?

nashathedog · 2 Jan 2016 at 10:42

Panos said:
And was a presentation about the Zen APUs that basically going to have Greenland based GPU with similar power to R9 290.

I can't see an apu with 290 performance coming anytime soon. That'll still be years away, As always they talk a good game. They just need to play it.

Freddie1980 · 2 Jan 2016 at 11:33

bru said:
Thread title is a tad misleading, I thought an actual chip had been spotted not just some literature on one. Also shouldn't this be in the CPU section?

No. The discussion is around HBM's effect on the graphics performance of future Zen APU's not the x86 side of the chip.

It sounds really promising, such a shame Zen is still a a way off at the moment. If AMD's partners develop some decent itx motherboards I may use one for my new media server.

fs123 · 2 Jan 2016 at 11:38

nashathedog said:
I can't see an apu with 290 performance coming anytime soon. That'll still be years away, As always they talk a good game. They just need to play it.

It may be possible with 14nm and with AMD's claim of 2x performance per watt. If a PS4 APU is similar to a 7870 then 2x that can give you 290 level performance. What would be interesting is if we could tri-fire with 2 discrete cards and the iGPU...

Mauller · 2 Jan 2016 at 12:29

Just had a thought. This could be the part going in the Nintendo NX, a deduction considering it speaks of HBM rated at 125GB/s. Which points to it being HBM 1.

I would believe that consumer APUs would use HBM2 if they are supposed to be out near end of 2016.

FoxEye · 2 Jan 2016 at 12:41

Mauller said:
Just had a thought. This could be the part going in the Nintendo NX, a deduction considering it speaks of HBM rated at 125GB/s. Which points to it being HBM 1.

I would believe that consumer APUs would use HBM2 if they are supposed to be out near end of 2016.

Wouldn't they still be limited to 4GB if they used HBM1?

In terms of marketing, that would look very bad. Average consumer is going to see 8GB PS4/XOne, or 4GB Nintendo NX, and think the Nx is worse.