AMD’s CEO Lisa Su revealed that AMD’s upcoming Carrizo APU will deliver the largest ever generational leap on performance per watt for mainstream APUs ever! In addition, she also confirmed that Carrizo will be launched in the second half of the year.
Previously, AMD stated that Carrizo would come sometime in mid-2015 which could have fell anywhere between Q2 and Q3. Now it has been confirmed that we will see Carrizo in Q2 of this year. Carrizo will be AMD’s last APU that is based off the Bulldozer family of CPU cores. It will feature AMD’s latest iteration of microarchitecture codenamed Excavator. I will also feature an updated GCN GPU architecture.
We plan to introduce a strong 2015 product portfolio, punctuated by the launch of Carrizo in the second quarter. Consumer and commercial design win momentum for Carrizo continue to gain momentum because it will deliver the largest ever generational leap in performance per watt for our mainstream APUs.
So we are enthusiastic about our Carrizo launch that will take place in the second quarter. I think if you look at, you know, the improvements that will come with that, HSA is one of them. We’ll also have significantly improved performance in battery life in Carrizo.
Carrizo will bring these improvements while maintaining the same 28 nm GlobalFoundries manufacturing process used for Kaveri. This shows that these improvements are coming from innovation, rather than a smaller manufacturing node.
We already know some of the new innovations and features that will come with Carrizo. One of the biggest will be full HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) 1.0 compliance. This will make Carrizo the first ever SoC to have full HSA support.
When it comes to traditional performance Carrizo will see higher clock speeds than its predecessor given the same power envelope. These new clock speeds are partially thanks to a new intelligent voltage management technology that allows AMD to reduce the voltage required to reach the desired frequency. AMD is able to achieve this by feeding the SoC just enough voltage for the target frequency and then reducing the frequency momentarily when voltage dips occur to maintain system stability.
This gives AMD a 15% improvement in performance for a given voltage, more or less a 15% improvement in performance per watt. It will be interesting to see if AMD uses this voltage management technology in other products.
Recent leaked benchmarks show almost double graphics performance compared to Kaveri.
Source: WCCFTech | News Archive
