AMD will soon start shipping its 7th-Generation A-Series chips in HP and Lenovo PCs

AMD has announced it will soon start shipping its 7th-Generation A-Series processors in desktop PCs from vendors HP and Lenovo.

Codenamed Bristol Ridge, the 7th-Gen A-Series accelerated processing units (APU) were originally said to be powering super-slim laptops and 2-in-1s, but the firm has since announced that the chips will start shipping in desktop systems from today.

The chips will arrive initially from HP and Lenovo, with other global OEMs designs to follow, AMD said, "delivering high-speed processing, smooth eSports gaming, and enhanced HD and UHD streaming capabilities, including the highest memory bandwidth to date for an AMD desktop platform."

"The consumer release of these new HP and Lenovo designs is an important milestone for AMD on two fronts," said Kevin Lensing, Corporate VP and general manager of Client Computing at AMD.

"First, it marks a major increase in productivity performance, streaming video and eSports gaming experiences sought after by today's consumers, delivered through our new 7th Generation AMD A-Series desktop processors.

"Second, because these new OEM designs also feature our new AM4 desktop platform, the motherboard ecosystem shows its readiness for our upcoming high-performance Summit Ridge' desktop CPUs featuring "Zen" cores, which share the same platform,"

Bristol Ridge is designed to take on Intel's newly released Kaby Lake offering, and has up to four Excavator x86 CPU cores, covering a wide power band spanning 65W to 35W.

"When compared to the Intel Core i5 6500, the new 65-watt processors offer up to equivalent productivity performance and up to 99 percent higher graphics performance," AMD claimed.

AMD said this power boost is thanks to the processor cores being coupled with AMD's Radeon R7 or R5 graphics chips, which the firm promises will give the APUs enough graphics power for the smooth online gaming and high-definition streaming.

AMD said earlier this year that Bristol Ridge provides a 50% improvement in CPU performance over the Kaveri APU released in 2014, and a 10% hike over the Carrizo generation released last year. This performance boost over the previous generation comes mostly from Bristol Ridge's access to a DDR4 memory controller, AMD said, giving the APU a greater memory bandwidth over the DDR3-sporting Carrizo.