[Manuel Calavera]

The latest rumor or should we say, update, comes from*BitsnChips*who have reported that AMD’s Raven Ridge APUs will be built by Global Foundries and packaged by South Korean Semiconductor company, Amkor. Amkor was the same company that packaged AMD’s Fiji GPUs (HBM+GPU+TSV). AMD will be using the GloFo-Amkor Duo to also package their next-gen Raven Ridge APUs that will utilize the next generation of HBM standard to deliver higher bandwidth to the faster discrete-class graphics chip featured on the SOC.

It is exciting to know that Raven Ridge will be a 14nm design from top-to-bottom. Since these APUs arrive in 2017, we can expect the Polaris GPU architecture to be deployed on these APUs which delivers up to 2.5 time performance per watt improvement compared to current generation GCN architecture.

AMD’s Carrizo APUs currently deploy the same GCN architecture which is found on Tonga and Fiji and Bristol Ridge is expected to keep the same design. Raven Ridge which deploys the GCN 4.0 GPU design will not only help APUs perform faster in graphics performance but also much more efficiently. AMD’s first Polaris demo was of an entry level chip which delivered great performance for a sub-40W design.

But with more graphics power comes more demand of bandwidth which unfortunately doesn’t provide a lot of bandwidth to faster graphics cores. Intel’s solution to feed higher bandwidth was faster eDRAM cache but AMD is deciding to go the HBM route. The HBM will act as fast DRAM which the GPU will have full access to. That’s the part two of the statement by*BitsnChips*who state that Amkor packaging AMD APUs is a hint that these are going to deploy the fast HBM DRAMs.

It’s not known what specific amount of HBM will be featured but a single HBM2 stack can deliver as much as 4 GB memory and 256 GB/s bandwidth. You can clock it up and down but the most entry level stack can still get as much as 128*GB/s. AMD’s HBM partner*SK Hynix*will begin production of 4 GB DRAMs in Q3 followed by 8 GB DRAMs in Q4 2016. They also have 2 GB but there’s no date issued how ever these low VRAM DRAMs sound most ideal for Raven Ridge APUs.

Regardless of the amount of VRAM, the bandwidth increase will be more than enough for the dGPU on board Raven Ridge and the 40% IPC increase just from the Zen cores will lead to a huge performance gain on AMD’s next gen APUs. Theperformance*of AMD Raven Ridge is expected to reach or even exceed the levels of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 performance due to better CPU, GPU and memory architecture. The Raven Ridge APUs will hit the AM4 platform and will be exciting to see how AMD handles these high-performance mainstream / consumer APUs when they launch in 2017.