AMD has shared extensive information on its latest piece of silicon called Carrizo. Just like chips before it, Carrizo will be an APU (accelerated processing unit in AMD’s terms), which means that next to computational cores, the chip will also have built-in Radeon graphics unlike the popular AMD FX processors.
Compared to some older AMD chips Carrizo will come to us with a number of significant hardware changes. The chip will be built on the somewhat old 28 nm tech process but despite this its computational cores will be smaller when compared to the current generation Kaveri chips. Carrizo will have Excavator CPU modules that will be 23 per cent smaller than today’s Steamroller cores which are built on the same 28 nm tech process. This is due to the fact that Excavator features a new high-density library design, which reduces the die area of the module. Thus the FPU scheduler is 38 per cent smaller, the FMAC (fused multiply-accumulate stack) units are 35 per cent smaller and the instruction cache controller is compacted by another 35 per cent. The GPU also draws benefits from the same technology – it has GPU-optimized high-density metal stack that helps with the reduction.
Carrizo does not come with fewer transistors though – the chip will have the impressive 3.1 billion transistors under the hood that come with notable new features themselves. The transistors now come with 18 per cent lower energy leakage compared to Kaveri, faster RVT components that allow for 10 per cent higher clock speeds at the same power draw, 19 per cent lower CPU power draw thanks to a new adaptive-voltage algorithm, reduced GPU power draw by 10 per cent, new low power states for mobile devices such as tablets and notebooks, and much reduced power consumption for these devices (1.5W in idle mode, 10W when active). All in all Carrizo will have 5 per cent more power at the same clock speed compared to Kaveri but 40 per cent lower power consumption and 23 per cent less die area.
The upcoming Carrizo chips will likely feature two Excavator modules, which means you will be getting four integer execution cores and two FPUs. As to the integrated GPU – it will also be improved – the new Radeon GPU will come with 512 stream processors on the latest Graphics Core Next 1.3 architecture, support for AMD Mantle and DirectX 12, H.265 hardware acceleration and more than 3.5 times better video transcoding performance when compared to Kaveri. In addition AMD says Carrizo will also greatly increase the battery life of notebooks and tablets that use this chip.
There will be about 10 Carrizo models on the launch date and according to online sources the model numbers will be as follows:
- AMD FX-8800P
- AMD PRO FX-8800B
- AMD A10-8700P
- AMD A8-8600P
- AMD A6-8500P
- AMD PRO A10-8700B
- AMD PRO A8-8600B
- AMD PRO A6-8500B
- AMD RX-418GD
- AMD RX-216GD
All these chips are intended for mobile devices such as notebooks and they will hardly appear as desktop parts. There is no information on clock speed and cache sizes as of now but it will surely come out when Carrizo gets closer to launch – an event, which is scheduled for summer 2015.
Source: Techpowerup.com