New details emerge on AMD Raven Ridge notebook platform

Like most every generation of an AMD CPU platform, the company is hoping that its next architecture will take back some market share from its more ubiquitous competitor. The Zen series is expected to be highly scalable for desktops down to notebooks, but the latest leaks are showing that its next generation CPUs for notebooks will receive special attention.

According to a roadmap slide leaked by SemiAccurate, Raven Ridge should be coming to market sometime next year and will be AMD's first consumer-ready 14 nm platform. In comparison, Intel is expected to launch its first 10 nm platform towards the end of 2017. Raven Ridge may be the successor to the current flagship Bristol Ridge and budget Stoney Ridge platforms.

The TDP of Raven Ridge would be highly variable from as low as 4 W up to 35 W. Thus, the series would be able to compete with Intel's fan-less Core M series as well.

As for AMD's desktop series, the company will purportedly be moving away from calling its cores "modules" to avoid criticisms and lawsuits of false advertisement. A quad-core AMD CPU, for example, is not an apple-to-apples comparison to a quad-core Intel CPU due how AMD designates a "core". Up to four AMD Zen APUs can be outfitted onto a notebook for a total of 16 Compute Units of which 12 can be reserved for the GPU.

For AMD to succeed at any level, it will be critical for the company to woo as many PC OEMs as possible. The current notebook market is flooded with Intel processors and AMD-equipped alternatives are not very common. It remains to be seen if AMD can buck this trend by next year.

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