Month: June 2016

(credit: Jenna)

For the first 16 years of my life, I was an actor. Not a big-time actor, of course: I starred in school plays and local amateur productions, usually as the lanky comic sidekick or later as sonorous historical figures. Playing Osiris in a school play about the Egyptian gods was probably the peak of my thespian career.

I saw a lot of weird things over the years, backstage and in dressing rooms, but unless you're interested in men in tights or pranks involving oil-based makeup, most of them wouldn't make any sense to recount on a technology website. One story involving a six-inch iron nail is definitely worth sharing, though.

It is safe to say that my school, if it had ever been inspected properly, would've failed almost every electrical safety check. The building was about 200 years old, and over the decades had been the victim of many hodgepodge extensions, electrification retrofits, and "ooh, all we need is a bit of electrical tape" fixes by handymen and groundskeepers.

AMD has fully taken the wraps off its brand new seventh generation APU architecture Bristol Ridge, which it announced earlier this year. It promises users around a 20 percent boost in CPU performance, and a 37 percent boost in GPU performance over Bristol Ridge's predecessor Carrizo, which launched in 2015. That's standard fare for generational updates, but what's most impressive is that AMD has squeezed this performance out of the exact same architecture as Carrizo: same 28nm transistors, same Excavator-based design.

At the high-end are the quad-core AMD FX, A12, and A10 chips, which come in 35W and 15W variants. Base clock speeds are as low as 2.4GHz in the 15W A10 and as high as 3.7GHz boost clock in the 35W FX. The FX and A12 come with up to eight GCN cores in a Radeon R7 graphics package, while the A10 comes with Radeon R5 graphics. All support DRR4 memory up to 2400MHz (versus 2133MHz DDR3 in Carrizo), which should give the on-board GPU a nice boost given how dependent its performance is on system memory.

At the mid- to low-range are the A9, A6, and E2 APUs, all of which sport a 15W TDP and more conservative clock speeds. Graphics take a cut too, with the A9 featuring Radeon R5, the A6 Radeon R4, and the E2 Radeon R2. Compared to Carrizo, these low-end chips still get a boost in performance, though, with AMD claiming clock speeds that are 1GHz higher, and up to 50 percent more GCN graphics cores. There's also support for HDMI 2.0 (finally), PCIe 3.0, and built in hardware decoding for MPEG, H.265, and VP9 video up to 4K resolutions.

AMD's first Polaris-based graphics card is here: the Radeon RX 480. Rather than launch a high-end card to compete with the likes of Nvidia's GTX 1080 or 1070, AMD's RX 480 is pitched at the wider mainstream market, offering just over five teraflops of performance for a mere $199—about half the price of a GTX 1070. UK pricing is currently TBC, but it'll probably be about £160. The RX 480 will be available to buy on June 29.

Details on the Polaris architecture—which is based on AMD's forth generation GCN architecture and a new 14nm FinFET manufacturing process—were thin on the ground during the RX 480's reveal at Computex 2016 in Taiwan, but the company did divulge a few key specs. The RX 480 will feature 36 compute units (CUs)—that's eight more than the R9 380, and just shy of the 40 of the R9 390—along with some fast GDDR5 memory attached to a 256-bit memory bus for 256GB/s of bandwidth.

The RX 480 will come in both 4GB and 8GB configurations (the former being the £160/$200 model), and will support AMD FreeSync and HDR video via its DisplayPort 1.3/1.4 and HDMI 2.0b outputs. Best of all, it has an average power draw of just 150W, which should make it cooler and quieter than AMD's previous-generation graphics cards.