AMD Reveals Upcoming AM4 Socket For Zen, New Wraith Quiet Cooler and Flagship A10-7890K APU At CES
For the most part, AMD used the Consumer Electronics Show to talk about the initiatives and upcoming products we’ve already discussed over the last few weeks, like FreeSync over HDMI and next-gen display technologies like HDR, GPUOpen, and the Polaris GPU architecture. In fact, the demo we wrote about in our Polaris piece, in which a system featuring a Polaris-based GPU pulls much less power from the wall than a GTX 950-based system, was on display for all to see.
AMD, however, also revealed some new products and technologies at CES, which include a quieter cooler, an APU, and the socket AMD’s upcoming Zen-based processors and APUs will use when they hit the market sometime later this year.
The new cooler, dubbed the Wraith, will be bundled with retail APUs and CPUs moving forward. Its claims to fame are much quieter operation than AMD’s current PIB cooler, thanks to a low-noise, constant velocity fan, significantly more surface area, and a back-lit AMD logo. The cooler features a dense array of aluminum fins, linked to a copper base via a quartet of heat pipes. The Wraith cooler is somewhat larger than AMD’s previous bundled cooler, but not large enough to pose any kind of clearance or compatibility issues on current motherboards.
AMD’s next APU, the A10-7890K, was also disclosed. The A10-7890K is essentially just a speed bump. It uses the same micro-architecture and core configuration (4 CPU + 8 GPU) as current-gen, top of the line A10 APUs, but kicks the max turbo frequency up to 4.3GHz. The current A10-7870K tops out at 4.1GHz. Like previous K-SKUs, the A10-7890K’s CPU and GPU are unlocked for easy overclocking.
The final piece of new information to come from AMD is its upcoming AM4 socket for Zen-based APUs and CPUs. AMD’s current APU / CPU line-up uses three different sockets – socket AM3+ for high-end FX processors, FM2+ for A-series APUs and Athlons, and AM1 for low-power Kabini-based parts. When AMD’s next-gen Zen-based APUs and CPUs launch, code-named Summit Ridge and Bristol Ridge, they will all use the same socket AM4. No other details on the actual socket configuration were give, however.
