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They don't work on AMD platforms of course

AMD has started selling Radeon DDR4 memory modules which only work on Intel Z170 chipsets and derivatives.

Apparently it is a move to ready the world for Zen which will also integrate the DRAM modules. It is sad that AMD is so far behind Intel that it has to release products for its rivals before it can ship its own.

The new AMD Radeon R7 DDR4 memory modules have dual-channel 8 GB memory kits rated to run at 2133MHz or 2400MHz with CL15 timings, which are pretty decent for your casual DDR4 DIMM kits meant for Z170 systems.

It is not clear if the modules will feature Intel's XMP (extreme memory profiles) technology. If they don't, the DDR4 DIMMs would be of little help to new Z170 chipset owners since they won't be able to enable XMP for extra performance.

The Skylake platform and the Haswell-E, and the vast majority of future DDR4 supporting platforms will run DDR4 DIMMs.

Intel has announced a vast portfolio of Skylake-based CPUs, ranging from the desktop, locked "T" models to the low-power "Y" and "H" ones, all working with DDR4.

AMD 's new DDR4 Radeon memory modules will have cross-chipset compatibility between Skylake users and future "Bristol Ridge" and "Summit Ridge" processors with "Excavator" and "Zen" cores that will also support DDR4 using the upcoming AM4 form factor. Existing AMD APUs support only DDR3 memory modules.

The Radeon R7 DDR4 memory modules are currently available in select stores in Germany and are not featured on AMD's official website.

Spotted in shipping manifest

While we already knew that AMD is working on a Fiji-based dual-GPU flagship graphics card, the newest leak from a shipping manifest suggest that AMD might name it as the Radeon R9 Gemini.

The Radeon R9 Gemini name does not come as a surprise considering AMD's recent naming scheme with Fury series and the R9 Nano. Spotted by Wccftech.com in a shipping manifest from Zauba, the Radeon R9 Gemini was shipped from AMD headquarters in Canada. While it was reffered to as the R9 Fury X2 or the R9 395X2, the R9 Gemini is a bit more plausible. The shipping manifest also reveals that AMD might be sticking to Cooler Master made AiO cooler with the Radeon R9 Gemini.

Earlier rumors also suggested that AMD will be pairing up two fully-enabled Fiji XT GPUs which means that we will be looking at a graphics card with a total of 8192 Stream Processors as well as pack 8GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), 4GB per GPU.

AMD will most likely market it as a graphics card that can push pretty much anything at 4K/UHD resolution and cope up with virtual reality gaming at impressive level of details.

The shipping manifest also included a value set at 125350 INR per unit, which converts to about US $1073. We would not be surprised if AMD launches the new R9 Gemini at somewhere close to that MSRP as this graphics card will provide some impressive performance.

Now that the R9 Gemini has been shipped from AMD's headquarters we will hopefully hear a bit more about it as more details are bound to leak out sooner or later.

Picture courtesy of Tweaktown.com

Consumer desktop and mobile products

Last week AMD announced its next generation PRO series APUs for business desktop and notebook PCs and now some more details have come to light.

These were  codenamed "Godavari PRO" and "Carrizo PRO" and will ship with business-class quality assurance, longer product longevity and extended warranty support.

They will also configure USB blocking options, manage internet bandwidth priorities, and scheduling some system activities, including system startup, backup, shutdown, and disk defragmentation. We already mentioned that the mobile processors are now available in HP EliteBook 7x5 series notebooks. Desktop APUs are shipped in HP EliteDesk 705 and Lenovo M79 computers.

Now CPU World has released a few specs:

The Mobile A6 PRO-8500B, A8 PRO-8600B, A10 PRO-8700B and A12 PRO-8800B are almost identical to the consumerish A6-8500, A8-8600P, A10-8700 and FX-8800P.

The processors use optimised Excavator microarchitecture, and have a larger level 1 instruction cache, but smaller level 2 cache than previous generation of PRO APUs.

A PRO-8xxx chips integrate GCN-based GPU which works with Heterogeneous Systems Architecture 1.0. An integrated security processor runs applications in protected environment.

The A6 PRO-8500B is a dual-core chip with 1.6 GHz clock speed, 1 MB L2 cache and Radeon R5 series graphics. Other three APUs have 4 CPU cores, double cache and R6 or R7 graphics. The CPU cores are clocked from 1.6 GHz to 2.1 GHz depending on model. Turbo Core frequency is supported by all processors, and its maximum frequency ranges from 3 GHz to 3.4 GHz.