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Pemalite on 20 August 2016
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Alby_da_Wolf said:
Pemalite said:

GPU compute should see significant gains.

Also AMD's Crossfire should love it, they don't do things over a bridge anymore, it's all done via PCI-E.

PCI-E 4.0, USB Type C, hopefully Sata 4 soon, DDR4, m.2... Slowly getting tempted to upgrade. Just need decently priced CPU's.

Luckily, unless AMD plans on ZEN be exclusively making APUs based on it or exclusively relying on 3rd parties for chipsets from now on, ZEN CPUs will require AMD to finally make new chipsets, and it will be a sensible choice to support other new technologies too in them, not just DDR4.

Yeah their chipset stagnation was pretty terrible.  The 990FX is (I think) essentially just a rebadged 700 series chipset... AMD relied on 3rd party chips for things like USB 3.0 and PCI-E 3.0 and Sata 3.1.

With that said, Socket AM3+/AM3 was neglected whilst they pushed APU's.


JEMC said:

If I'm not mistaken, AMD will unify its motherboards, with the upcoming AM4 platform, and the first chips that will use that new platform are the Bristol Ridge APUs that will launch soon.

What I don't know is if AMD will still rely on a Northbridge to provide the PCIe lanes or if they'll go like Intel and put that into the CPU.

There was a blurry (of course) pic of the AM4 motherboard AMD used to demonstrate the new chips at Computex, and it doesn't seem to have a Northbridge chip.

http://wccftech.com/amd-am4-motherboard-bristol-ridge-apu-spotted/

 

AMD integrated the full North Bridge a long time ago on it's APU's, Intel did the same around the same time with Sandy Bridge.
On the full desktop side though, AMD started migrating parts of the North Bridge starting with the Athlon 64.

I think with Zens release though, AMD could take two apparoaches... Integrate the North Bridge fully onto the CPU die or Combine what's "left over" with the South Bridge. (Which will likely have some elements migrated over to the CPU also.)
There are advantages to either approach.

You are also correct. AMD will use one socket to rule them all.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--