Friday, December 30th 2016
AMD A12-9800 "Bristol Ridge" AM4 APU with ASUS A320M-C Tested
German PC enthusiast "Crashtest" clinched a sweet combo of an AMD A12-9800 "Bristol Ridge" socket AM4 APU with an ASUS A320M-C entry-level micro-ATX motherboard, for 200€. Pairing it with 8 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2133 memory, the platform was put through the AIDA64 test-suite. In the memory front, the platform performs on-par with older platforms at comparable DDR3 bandwidth. The K15.6 integrated memory controller isn't producing the kind of memory bandwidth as the Core i7-6700K with dual-channel DDR4-2133 memory from AIDA64's internal reference bench table.
In the CPU-related tests, the APU has about the same performance as its predecessors, such as the A10-7850K. The chip features two "Excavator" x86-64 CPU modules, making up four cores, and is clocked at 4.20 GHz. There are performance upticks seen in tests such as Hash and VP8, where the chip likely benefits from new instruction sets.More results follow.
Below are pictures of the board and the A12-9800 chip.
Source:
Crashtest on Planet3DNow Forums
In the CPU-related tests, the APU has about the same performance as its predecessors, such as the A10-7850K. The chip features two "Excavator" x86-64 CPU modules, making up four cores, and is clocked at 4.20 GHz. There are performance upticks seen in tests such as Hash and VP8, where the chip likely benefits from new instruction sets.More results follow.
Below are pictures of the board and the A12-9800 chip.
35 Comments on AMD A12-9800 "Bristol Ridge" AM4 APU with ASUS A320M-C Tested
True Zen apus have an unknown release date, if i'm not mistaken.
Bristol Ridge is just a respin of Carrizo. It officially supports DDR4, while Carrizo was released only in DDR3 configurations. It also reaches higher clock speeds than Carrizo did, both on CPU cores and iGPU. The DDR4 support allows it to be the first AM4 socket APU.
Stoney Ridge is a budget APU, also with Excavator cores, but only one pair of them and a smaller iGPU. I don't know whether it's coming to AM4 as well, but it's definitely showing up in cheap laptops.
Summit Ridge is the first Zen CPU. It'll also be on AM4, but it won't have an iGPU at all. Coming Soon™.
Raven Ridge will be the first Zen APU, with the iGPU being Vega-derived. This will be the third AM4 chip, and the second AM4 APU. However it won't be ready until several months after Summit Ridge is released.
AMD wants to retire the old AM3+ and FM2+ sockets ASAP. Giving us Bristol Ridge on AM4 lets them do that without leaving a huge gap in the low end of the market.
This page of AMD CPU history should be closed and forgotten.
Remember, this is a relatively cheap APU; the bundle with m/board costs similar to a Core i3 + m/board, and the iGPU surely outperforms the i3's. The board will also happily take upgrades to Zen+Vega, making it impressively future-proof.
If AM4 uses new hole dimensions, how can you have used an 'old' oem cooler? The old cooler will be AM3 compatible, not AM4. I read it as the APU came with an OEM cooler?
What's changed with AM4 are the mounting holes. M/boards have new, straight plastic brackets which fit into the new mounting holes and provide the old stock-heatsink mounting points. You just need new mounting hardware for most aftermarket heatsinks.
A few aftermarket heatsink vendors, including Noctua, have promised to make new mounting hardware available for existing models.
I would imagine it should be better than 7850k with CL 9
Bristol Ridge, being essentially an existing product repackaged, offers an inexpensive way to build an AM4-based machine that can subsequently be upgraded very nicely - and on a per-core basis it *is* generally an improvement over previous AMD CPUs, despite its smaller L2 caches and lack of L3 cache. Look at how close it gets to the FX-8350 on several tests, at half the power consumption and slightly lower clock speeds.
Ironically I posted that before I posted here, but obviously you probably didn't see it but is just funny, because I have glanced at AMD news for last several years but till I heard of Zen I was just tired of AMD for sucking and Intel for just sitting on their lead doing squat. But trust me I'm as excited as anyone about Zen, I have an x79 system and it should be ancient and cheap and irrelevant...instead CPU's for it still are several hundred to even a thousand dollars! That's crazy for a platform from 2011. So I've got an ES 3960x which prevents me updating to latest bios (no support beyond certain bios version) and I am eyeing an 8 core xeon but about a grand for that thing! Currently even if I want a 4960x it's 400-500 on ebay....until last week or so I just looked noticed a few go for just over 300 bucks, possibly already demand shrinking due to Zen rumors? I hope so. Like you said Zen succeeding helps all of us, value and innovation in cpu's has been dead while GPU's have continued to fly along mostly and AMD and Nvidia both have kept up most every generation.
Skylake to Kaby Lake or A10-7800 to A12-9800.
Seriously what is the point of this apu? So you can upgrade to a Zen later? That is silly as you can get (on newegg) a 7850k for $90, fm2 mb for $35, and 8gb of descent ddr3 for $50. That is $175 TOTAL. You are better off going that route and upgrading to the newest motherboard and Zen cpu instead of screwing around switching out cpus.
It's also so that Joe Average and his grandparents, wandering into Best Buy with no real clue about what's inside a computer, have at least *some* chance of buying into a future-proof platform instead of an orphaned one. AMD released the AM4 platform to OEM prebuilt partners first.
I myself have an A10-7850K already. Bristol Ridge isn't a significant performance upgrade from that, so I almost certainly won't buy one. But if I desperately needed to build *something* today, I'd look for Bristol Ridge first, because I then wouldn't need to replace $85 worth (by your figures) of hardware that Zen can't use. That's worth the difference between $175 and €200.
What's intensely frustrating is that, months after the OEM release, we still can't buy AM4 gear at retail except for this single, rather obscure bundle. It really cramps the options available to give advice on.