AMD Zen APUs to feature up to 16 cores and integrated graphic with HBM

Posted on Tuesday, March 31 2015 @ 15:58 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
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Some more information leaked about Zen, AMD's next-gen x86 APU architecture that is scheduled to hit the market in 2016. FUD Zilla writes today that Zen will offer various improvements in its features set, the new chip wil include quad-channel DDR4 memory support, PCIe 3.0, up to sixteen cores and the Greenland integrated graphics with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).

The site suggests Zen will have a modular design, for the lower-end market one module will deliver four cores while higher-end versions can get up to four modules for sixteen cores.
There is a good chance that Greenland is based on the Fiji architecture and it will be intresting to see if AMD plans to use HBM1 or HBM2 memory for its latest 2016 APU. Our sources are uncertain about this. Each of the Zen cores will have dedicated L2 and share L3 cache with three other cores, suggesing a four-core module design. The CPU cores will "talk" to HBM graphics cores via a special communication channel called Coherent Fabric. The Coherent Fabric channle eliminates PCIe latency and we will try to find out more about this technology.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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