Korean website Bodnara has seemingly beaten all other media to the punch and published a pretty detailed review of AMD’s highly anticipated Bristol Ridge platform. The review pits and AMD A12-9800 APU against an A10-7870K chip based on the previous Karevi architecture. This is basically the first time we have seen any data on performance outside of what the AMD PR machine has been feeding us, and from an initial analysis, things certainly do look promising for AMD.

In terms of core counts actually both the chips line up fairly similarly. The AMD A12-9800 is a quad-core APU that integrates eight GPU cores, as does the A10-7870. The real differences lie in the improved architecture of the Excavator cores, the fact that it is more power efficient thus operating at a lower TDP of 65W compared 95W, plus other improvements such support for DDR4.

The data looks to be reasonably impressive, especially as the test configuration used a 2133 DDR4 to help us make a better core v core comparison with the Karevi chip. In pure IPC single core performance is around 6%, with multi-core testing offering an improvement of around 15%. These are early days, and for sure with improved memory settings we should see much more gains. Although these figures are positive, a truer picture of AMD’s capability in the high-end CPU space will be apparent when Summit Ridge FX branded CPUs arrives early next year.

The article from Bodnara can be found here.Discuss in the HWBOT forum here.