A few weeks ago, AMD was revealing two of the Ryzen G-series Picasso APUs at E3, but it looks like the red team is also preparing to launch new PRO and Athlon versions for the Picasso family, as revealed by Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer ASRock in a processor support list update.
While AMD is exclusively collaborating with TSMC for the 7 nm Ryzen 3000 CPUs, the company has not completely cut ties with Global Foundries, which is reportedly manufacturing the new 12 nm Picasso APUs. As opposed to previous gen Zen-based Raven Ridge chips, the new Picasso APUs use the Zen+ tech found in the Ryzen 2000-series. Still, the new chips integrate the same Vega iGPU microarchitecture from the previous gen.
The new top of the line APUs are represented by the PRO chips, which come with improved security and enterprise features, plus longer warranty. The performance is said to be essentially the same as that of the non-PRO versions. There will be G and GE variants for both PRO and non-PRO chips, and the GE versions are expected to be slightly slower since they come with lower TDPs. From the leaked specs, the Picasso chips appear to have clocks increased by 100 MHz, while the core count, L2 cache and TDPs are unchanged. The only chip to break this pattern is the Athlon 300GE, which gets a 200 MHz clock bump compared to the existing Athlon 200GE.
No word on any launch date or pricing for these APUs at present, but they should be released before the rumored 7 nm chips scheduled to launch in late 2019 / early 2020.
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