News
News Categories

AMD officially announces Carrizo, the next-gen APU

By Vijay Anand - on 24 Nov 2014, 3:40am

AMD officially announces Carrizo, the next-gen APU

This is the actual Carrizo chip from AMD, so it's definitely not vaporware and it's coming sometime first half of 2015.

At AMD's Future of Compute event in Singapore, Corporate VP and Product CTO for AMD, Joe Macri for the first time unveiled AMD's next-gen APU codenamed Carrizo. It will directly succeed AMD's big Kaveri launch early this year and is aimed at performance mobile computing devices (including the currently trending convertible form factor models) and AIO desktops, which is the same space Kaveri was intended for. To be accurate, it will be available as Carrizo and Carrizo-L parts, both using the same package, but with the latter naturally having a stronger focus of low power compute.

From what we gathered, aside from improved performance that can be expected from a more advanced DirectX 12 capable GCN graphics core based graphics engine, the all new Excavator core is highly optimized for power efficiency and is the first APU to integrate the Southbridge chipset functionality within the same APU die. This means Carrizo APU based systems are much more streamlined with better power control as there's less out-of-chip interdependency to manage.

While Kaveri has in a way already achieved what AMD and the stakeholders of Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) consortium wanted to achieve whereby the CPU and GPU usage would be completely transparent to end users and software developers (it allows a certain level of interchangeability where compatible instructions can be executed in either the CPU or GPU cores, thereby making all its compute resources available for use anytime), Carrizo's high integration of core system components allows it to deliver better performance and battery life to ensure that it's the first processor in the world with full HSA 1.0 support.

Carrizo will also inherit other notable advancements that debuted with lower tiered APUs codenamed Mullins and Beema, such as the AMD Secure Processor that's based off an ARM Cortex A5 with ARM TrustZone technology for enterprise-class security and new power management techniques like Skin Temperature Aware Power Management (STAPM) and Intelligent Boost Control. You can read more about all these technologies in our AMD Mullins Preview article for more details.

Carrizo in a nutshell.

Now, before you get all excited of what Carrizo has to offer, it's currently slated for 1H 2015, which is still quite some time away, though AMD has assured us that they are on schedule. We don't yet know of the exact core configurations, models and Excavator core specific enhancements, but we were told that more will be revealed in the coming months. What we believe might be true is that the current FM2+ socket might likely be reused with Carrizo. We bet CES 2015 might have some updates in store for us, so stay tuned to us as we bring you more updates on AMD's next big APU push.

Other notable updates from AMD's Future of Compute Event includes collaboration updates with Samsung supporting AMD's Freesync technology for their upcoming UHD monitors, Futuremark's sneak peek of their next-gen benchmark software roadmap and more support for AMD's Mantle initiative.

Source: AMD, AMD's YouTube channel

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.