AMD has finally made its Bristol Ridge range of accelerated processing units (APU available to the public, more than a year on from their original release to OEMs. The chips pack a powerful graphics processor on the same die as AMD's last generation, non-Ryzen CPU, making for a solidly powerful package that should be a good choice for those building micro-ITX systems.
As much as Ryzen has been the big AMD technology of 2017 -- considering Vega didn't quite live up to the hype -- that doesn't mean that everything that came before it is terrible. AMD's Excavator v2 processors were far from slow, especially when paired with a decent GPU.
They sport a TDP of just 35w, despite the bundled graphics. The A12-9800E is a two module, four threaded processor, running at 3.1 GHz and turboing up to 3.8Ghz as and when required. It comes with an R7 GPU on die too, with 512 stream processors, all priced at $105.
The A10-9700E is a little more affordable at $85, though you do sacrifice a little frequency for it. The two module, four threaded chip only turbos to 3.5GHz and its graphics chip has just 384 stream processors and a slightly reduced clock speed of its own.
The cheapest of the bunch (thanks Anandtech) is the A6-9500E which has just one module and two threads, with a core frequency of 3.0GHz/3.4GHz when at idle and turboed respectively. It comes with a Radeon R5 graphics chip with 256 stream processors. Its price tag is just $55.
What do you think of this new APu lineup? Do you think it might offer a cheaper way to kit out your next micro PC build?
