AMD has discolsed that its forthcoming Zen-based chips will put an end to the multi-socket support of today's FX chips and AMD APUs, as they will share the same socket, dubbed AM4. AMD’s Zen-based CPUs and APUs - codenamed "Summit Ridge" and "Bristol Ridge," respectively, will be compatible with the AM4 socket, AMD says.

The Summit Ridge CPUs will succeed the Vishera FX products, while the Bristol Ridge APUS will succeed the Godavari APU, also introduced as "seventh-generation A-Series Desktop APUs".

The Zen architecture promises to deliver 40 percent more instructions per clock than today’s Excavator cores by embracing a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) architecture design similar to that of Intel’s Core series rather than the cluster-based multi-threading (CMT) approach AMD adopted for its Bulldozer/Excavator CPUs. Zen will also introduce support for DDR4 RAM.

AMD has not yest disclosed any details related to the Bristol Ridge APUs, but we can assume that the SoC will include the South Bridge functionality. In addiition, only DDR4 memory will be supported.

According to AMD, the release time for both products are sometime in the fourth quarter of 2016.

But until then, AMD will soon release the A10-7890K APU for desktops, which will be clocked at 4.3GHz (max turbo, unlocked). The fastest AMD desktop APU ever released will pack high-end Radeon graphics (unlocked), will support DDR3-2133 and higher with AMD Memory Profiles, AMD FreeSync technology.

The AMD A10-7890K accelerated processing unit is based on the Kaveri design. The APU will integrate two Steamroller modules (four x86 cores), 4 MB L2 cache, the AMD Radeon R7 integrated GPU with 512 stream processors and GCN 1.1 architecture, a dual-channel DDR3 memory controller (which supports up to DDR3-2133 memory) as well as second-generation video coding engine (VCE) and fourth-generation unified video decoder (UVC) units for video playback.