14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices may continue to be vague about when the next generation of desktop APUs will come out, but it has proven much more willing to release the technical details of the Carrizo.
During a technical preview last week, the Sunnyvale, California-based company described the main assets of the accelerated processing units and the Excavator CPU module.
It seems that Excavator is superior to the Steamroller in all the ways that matter, even though it is structured similarly.
Which is to say, each Excavator module has a pair of x86-64 CPU cores structured like they are in the previous three AMD CPU core generations.
A smaller Excavator CPU core doesn't translate in weaker Carrizo chips
The CPU module is 23% smaller than Steamroller despite being designed on the same 28nm fabrication technology as the latter. This is thanks to a new high-density library design.
The floating-point scheduler is 38% smaller, the fused multiply-accumulate (FMAC) units are squeezed by 35%, even the instruction-cache controller is 35% more compact. GPU-optimized high-density metal stack helped a fair bit in this.
In spite of the smaller die size, however, Carrizo has 3.1 billion transistors. For the sake of comparison, know that Intel Haswell-D has 1.4 billion.
CPU power draw is cut as well, by around 19%, thanks to a new adaptive-voltage algorithm implemented by AMD. The same feature makes integrated GPU power draw go down 10%.
As for the integrated GPU, it is based on the Graphics CoreNext 1.3 architecture, has eight compute units, H.265 hardware-acceleration, over 3.5 times the video transcoding performance of Kaveri, and support for both the Mantle API and DirectX 12.
The mobile version of Carrizo
There will be chips intended for laptops and tablets, not just desktops. These APUs will have power draw as low as 1.5W when idle and 10W when active. AMD says this and the new low power states translate into "double-digit percentage" improvements in battery life.
The summary
Carrizo will be 23% smaller than Kaveri while using 40% less power, which is a staggering difference. All the while, performance is set to be superior as well.
