AMD is launching one last chip for the FM2+ platform

[mongeese]

WTF?! It sounds like a joke, but surprisingly, it’s true: meet the AMD A8-7680. Based on the now nearly five years old A8-7600 and launching on the nearly eight year old FM2+ socket, this will certainly be a chip that absolutely no one cares about.

The chip was first suspected to be coming when Asrock updated their BIOS to support it on their A68H motherboards – though admittedly most people thought it was an error at the time. Just recently, however, an official AMD document began listing the device, and several online retailers have put it up for sale. Though at around $55, it comes up against the far more modern Athlon 200GE.

According to its listings, the A8-7680 features four cores and four threads with a 3.5Ghz base clock and a whopping 3.8Ghz boost clock. It’s technically unlocked but there’s little hope of pushing it very far given its 28nm node, and notorious Excavator architecture.

Only the base clock has been improved from the old A8-7600, and by a measly 400Mhz at that. Surprisingly, a large number of motherboards have actually updated their BIOS to support it, including the Asus A68HM-K, A68HM-Plus, Gigabyte F2A68HM-DS2 rev1.1, F2A68HM-H rev1.1, F2A68HM-S1 rev1.1, MSI A68HM-E33-v2, ASRock FM2A68M-HD+, and FM2A68M-DG3+.

Technically, the chip is specced higher than the Athlon 200GE, which only features two cores at 3.2Ghz. So maybe it’ll be worth a buy. But really AMD, what's the point?

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/77136-amd-launching-one-last-chip-fm2-platform.html

 

[psycros]

Sounds like a good upgrade to enable old machines to handle the latest NAS, HTPC or office applications. Truthfully, most games coming out these days will run fine on a six year old mid-range gaming rig - the majority of new releases are lightweight indie stuff.

 

[tipstir]

What's the joke have A8 here running fine.

AMD A8-5500 Quad Core
AMD Radeon HD 7560D

Right now my is 3.2GHz boost is 3.7GHz

vs

new

A8-7680 3.5GHz boost to 3.8GHz

I don't see much of upgrade from 3.2 GHz to 3.5 GHz boost is only 1 GHz

 

[GeforcerFX]

Just upgraded from a A8-5500B that got for $17 at the beginning of the year, to a A8-5600k that I got for $23. So I went from a 3.5ghz to 4.2ghz for $23, opened up a few games I was CPU limited in. Honestly nice to see some support but it would have been a better move to maybe release a 8 core no GPU chip onto the platform, just take a FX-8300 series chip and redo the pin array to allow people on the platform to get a nice CPU boost if they choose to.

 

[erickmendes]

Too much spare time...

 

[ET3D]

The A8-7680 isn't based on the A8-7600. The A8-7680 is rumoured to be based on Carrizo (Excavator cores) -- more about this in a minute -- and the A8-7600 is Kaveri.

The specs for the A8-7680 and the A6-7480, which was also mentioned, suspiciously look exactly like the A10-9700 and A6-9500. Given that Bristol Ridge was originally advertised as supporting both DDR4 and DDR3 (for FP4 socket support, supposedly so it could be a drop-in replacement for Carrizo), I think there's enough ground to suspect that these new chips are Bristol Ridge based.

My suspicion is that AMD has killed the for market Bristol Ridge AM4 by releasing the Athlon 200GE, but still has leftover Bristol Ridge chips, which it needs to unload (and, who knows, perhaps it's even still manufacturing them for laptops, and using the better binned chips in that market). Since FM2+ already had a Carrizo chip (the Athlon X4 845), and BR is very similar to it, it was probably not that hard to make the move. If these chips find some success, perhaps we'll see an A10-7880 or whatever, an A12-9800 in disguise.

From my point of view, it's not that bad, assuming they're reasonably priced. Bristol Ridge supports 4K video decode and encode, something that no other FM2+ chip does, far as I know. Could be a nice upgrade.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Sounds like a good upgrade to enable old machines to handle the latest NAS, HTPC or office applications. Truthfully, most games coming out these days will run fine on a six year old mid-range gaming rig - the majority of new releases are lightweight indie stuff.

But the A8 7600 has been out for years now. Why spend money upgrading a long dead platform with a 2013 era CPU core?

Just upgraded from a A8-5500B that got for $17 at the beginning of the year, to a A8-5600k that I got for $23. So I went from a 3.5ghz to 4.2ghz for $23, opened up a few games I was CPU limited in. Honestly nice to see some support but it would have been a better move to maybe release a 8 core no GPU chip onto the platform, just take a FX-8300 series chip and redo the pin array to allow people on the platform to get a nice CPU boost if they choose to.

Why would they do that when they have ryzen to offer? Besides, FM2+ boards were not designed to support the massive power draw of 8 core bulldozer CPUs, thats why they never came out in the first place.

If you want 8 CPU cores, get ryzen. Bulldozer is pathetically slow, even your 4.2 GHz A8 gets spanked by entry level dual core i3s. Putting the effort into making an 8 core FM2+ CPU would be beyond ridiculous.

 

[CosmoXX]

The comment the author made about nobody caring about this CPU is ridiculous. Shows that the author knows squat about computers, the industry, and semiconductors as a whole.

There is a huge market for performance CPU's (even old ones) that are used in various machines like banking, cash registers, cars, routers, etc... These systems don't need the raw force of a current tech and will work just fine with cheaper less powerful CPU's. That is the market this CPU is intended for.

The fact that some users also use them for productivity shows that there is a market. The electronics corner in Taipei is full of outdated electronics, every bit of which is useful for creating new systems or designing new tech.

Just because this author doesn't have the experience to see the use of this CPU doesn't mean that there aren't any applications.

As such, he should not disparage others work. It's unclassy, juvenile, and only gives away his meagre understanding of technology at large. He shouldn't be writting the news if he doesn't understand the use of CPU's.

And if he is writting the news, then he should learn to write using an unbiased perspective.

 

[CosmoXX]

Sounds like a good upgrade to enable old machines to handle the latest NAS, HTPC or office applications. Truthfully, most games coming out these days will run fine on a six year old mid-range gaming rig - the majority of new releases are lightweight indie stuff.

But the A8 7600 has been out for years now. Why spend money upgrading a long dead platform with a 2013 era CPU core?

Just upgraded from a A8-5500B that got for $17 at the beginning of the year, to a A8-5600k that I got for $23. So I went from a 3.5ghz to 4.2ghz for $23, opened up a few games I was CPU limited in. Honestly nice to see some support but it would have been a better move to maybe release a 8 core no GPU chip onto the platform, just take a FX-8300 series chip and redo the pin array to allow people on the platform to get a nice CPU boost if they choose to.

Why would they do that when they have ryzen to offer? Besides, FM2+ boards were not designed to support the massive power draw of 8 core bulldozer CPUs, thats why they never came out in the first place.

If you want 8 CPU cores, get ryzen. Bulldozer is pathetically slow, even your 4.2 GHz A8 gets spanked by entry level dual core i3s. Putting the effort into making an 8 core FM2+ CPU would be beyond ridiculous.

The A8 is clearly a cheaper CPU to produce. At 28nm monolithic yields are great. Ryzen(Zen) is an architecture designed for fabrication at small nodes where monolithic CPU architecture provides poor yields.

 

[seeprime]

At first I thought this chip woudl be a low cost upgrade for some older PC's that had A4 APU's in them. Too bad it appears to be limited to the A68 chipset and not the superior 78 or 88 chipsets. That's weird.

 

[GeforcerFX]

But the A8 7600 has been out for years now. Why spend money upgrading a long dead platform with a 2013 era CPU core?


Why would they do that when they have ryzen to offer? Besides, FM2+ boards were not designed to support the massive power draw of 8 core bulldozer CPUs, thats why they never came out in the first place.

If you want 8 CPU cores, get ryzen. Bulldozer is pathetically slow, even your 4.2 GHz A8 gets spanked by entry level dual core i3s. Putting the effort into making an 8 core FM2+ CPU would be beyond ridiculous.

Well my A8 is rated at 100 watts, and the fx 8300 is rated at 95 watts so I doubt power was a issue. But I didn't really state that I was talking more about back in the day say 2014-2015 having a FM2 chip that was just a fx-8300 would have allowed a decent upgrade path for people on the platform back then. I had no interest in spending the $250 to get into a modern platform, but I was fully aware of the advantage to it. I spent the first $20 late last year to go from a A4 to the A8 and this additional $20 coupled with the $15 I spent on a HD 7570 gives me a great boost in the games I am playing and planning to play. As was stated already since these are based on carrizo, this is prob AMD offering a small but affordable upgrade path while getting rid of excess stock they have made pointless on AM4 now.

 

[ET3D]

I'll repeat my speculations from the Anandtech thread about this:

Given that the only BIOS updates are for the A68H, which is the only FM2+ chipset currently being sold (and technically no different than the A88X, for example), it seems that this is aimed at new buyers.

AMD has said when Ryzen was released that it would continue to manufacture (4 core) AM3+ chips for markets that want cheap AMD platforms (the Far East). I assume that 32nm manufacturing has wound down and that AMD has moved to fulfill the same need with FM2+ Bristol Ridge.

 

[TempleOrion]

[QUOTE="ET3D, post: 1711481, member: 236347"
AMD has said when Ryzen was released that it would continue to manufacture (4 core) AM3+ chips for markets that want cheap AMD platforms (the Far East).[/QUOTE]

Agree to an extent but think Africa and South Asia (India/Pak) are more the likely market.

 

[ET3D]

Agree to an extent but think Africa and South Asia (India/Pak) are more the likely market.

Reasonable. It's unfortunate that it's so hard to google for specific articles I want. AMD did talk about it at the time, and that could clarify things a lot better than my hazy memory can.