They will be designed for tablets and will have low TDPs

Jan 19, 2015 12:37 GMT  ·  By

Since Advanced Micro Devices severed ties with TSMC in order to have Globalfoundries make its chips, the door was opened for 20nm technology. The Amur and Nolan APUs will be the first ones.

That is what previous reports say at least, and what a more recent leak suggests. If only there was some actual information on the chips.

Alas, there are no details available about them. Only that they will be designed on the 20nm fabrication process technology. Their specifications can only be guessed at.

By all accounts, it appears that the Amur and Nolan will be stepping stones, precursors to the Zen generation that will arrive at some point in 2015. Zen will be a 16nm Bulldozer successor.

The Amur and Nolan will come forth in the second half of 2015

This is stated nowhere, but can be inferred. The latest AMD mobility roadmap only mentions the Carrizo and Carrizo-L, as well as the Mullins. Thus, one could say that it's possible for the chips to also have been shelved, if not canceled outright.

However, that mobility roadmap, as depicted in presentation slides, only accounted for the first half of the year. Who can say what will happen, what products will be launched in the third and fourth quarters?

With NVIDIA's Tegra X1 now out, and featuring 1 TFLOP of power, Advanced Micro Devices kind of needs something to tip the scales.

AMD's presence on the tablet front has been more or less nonexistent, but everything has to start somewhere, and the Amur and Nolan could finally give it an inroad, now that even Intel has established a beachhead (the 16nm Core-m Broadwell).

The specs of the Amur and Nolan

We assume that they will be quad-core units with Radeon graphics, or one will be a dual-core and one a quad-core. Either way, they will be APU/SoCs, of a sort.

They will surely have BGA packages as well, meaning they will be soldered to whatever motherboards tablets will employ.

The performance cannot be guessed at. Perhaps AMD will push at least one of the two near NVIDIA Tegra X1 speed-wise, with the other left for the less overkill tablets in the world (the ones not intended to be console replacements as it were).

As for power draw, it will be of 2-4.5TDP, or perhaps a little more if the Sunnyvale, California company doesn't succeed in making its chip as efficient as the Intel Core m.

Although if it combined x86 architecture with one or two ARM cores (which will take over when nothing too strenuous is being performed), that issue would be effectively dodged.

Alas, all of this information is four parts out of five speculation, so don't use it to base your plans around.