AMD's AM4 socket really is shaping up to be one of the company's most versatile to date. From true quad-core CPUS (just now available through Ryzen 3's launch through to veritable svelte behemoths 8-core, 16-thread CPUs, AM4 has something for every consumer. AMD is now taking that show further with the release of the Bristol Ridge family of APUs, which includes eight APUs and three CPUs. While pricing wasn't announced at time of writing, the top-priced part should fall below the $110 mark and bottom out at $50, so as not to collide with AMD's Ryzen 3 1200 (although these products aren't specifically overlapping anyway.)

AMD's new entry-level processors will hit a maximum of 65 W TDP, with the top spot being taken by the 2-module, 4-threads A12-9800, running at 3.8 GHz base and 4.2 GHz Turbo. This part holds a Radeon R7 GPU with 512 Stream Processors (GCN 1.3, the same as in the Fury GPUs) running at 800 MHz Base and 1108 MHz Turbo. There are three 35 W parts (denoted by a capital E after the model name.) One thing users should take into account is that the Bristol Ridge APUs deliver a maximum of 8x PCIe 3.0 lanes - thus rendering a multi-GPU solution unfeasible.If you are going to use the integrated GPU on these, you should probably take note of the supported display modes:

• DVI, 1920x1200 at 60 Hz
• DisplayPort 1.2a, 4096x2160 at 60 Hz (FreeSync supported)
• HDMI 2.0, 4096x2160 at 60 Hz
• eDP, 2560x1600 at 60 Hz

Codec-wise, Bristol Ridge supports the following (natively unless specified):

• MPEG2 Main Profile at High Level (IDCT/VLD)
• MPEG4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile at Level 5
• MJPEG 1080p at 60 FPS
• VC1 Simple and Main Profile at High Level (VLD), Advanced Profile at Level 3 (VLD)
• H.264 Constrained Baseline/Main/High/Stereo High Profile at Level 5.2
• HEVC 8-bit Main Profile Decode Only at Level 5.2
• VP9 decode is a hybrid solution via the driver, using CPU and GPU

AMD still continues to support HSA (heterogeneous System Architecture; remember that?), and the pairing of the Excavator v2 modules in Bristol Ridge coupled with the GCN graphics features Full 1.0 specification support. Performance-wise, the company is claiming the 2-module, 4-thread design of the A12-9800 on PCMark 8 Home with OpenCL acceleration scores the same as a Core i5-6500 ($192 tray price), while the A12-9800E is listed at a 17% increase in performance over the i5-6500T. On 3D Mark, AMD is claiming its A12-9800 APU scores 104% better than Intel's Pentium G4560, while delivering the same performance under PC Mark 8.