AMD is currently developing their Zen-based APUs. The first batch of accelerated processing units will come with four Zen CPU cores and a Polaris GPU and is speculated to arrive by 2017.
The upcoming APUs are designed for notebooks which will be cable of carrying up to 11 GCN cores, while those that will go with embedded systems will be capable of delivering up to 704 stream cores. AMD is also rumored to be developing a 32-core chip purposely built for server machines.
The AMD Zen APU with four cores will have a 512KB cache and an 8MB shared L3 cache per core, which is a standard for the company's Zen cores. It will also be able to support a DDR4 memory architecture with speeds up to 3,200 MHz. ECC memory support is also possible with other variants, Fudzilla reported.
As for its embedded GPU, with the company's introduction of Polaris 10, enthusiasts can expect the Zen APU to have a performance close to an RX 460 card but with fewer stream processors. This will also allow up to four DisplayPort 1.3s, HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.4.
Additionally, its power consumption or Thermal Design Power (TDP) is estimated to be between 45 W and 65 W for the socket AM4 variant, while an embedded APU version can go as low as 12 W to 45 W.
The AMD Zen APU is based on the 14 nm FINFET manufacturing process, just like Intel's Skylake and its upcoming Kaby Lake processors. AMD is targeting a 40 percent increase in performance with their next-gen APUs.
The next-gen APUs will also allow the use of USB 3.1, including USB Type-C, and NVMe with a simple addition of an updated chipset.
WCCFTech previously reported that the company will launch Zen-based FX CPUs, designed for desktops, anytime this fourth quarter and will directly compete with Intel's quad-core i7 and i5 and dual-core i3 CPUs.
For the meantime, fans can expect more news to come within the next few months.
