14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may still have most of the laptop market well in hand, but Advanced Micro Devices has some mobile accelerated processing units gloating around too. APUs that will make way for new ones soon enough.
It appears that the Sunnyvale, California-based company is serious about the decision it made a few years back, to not have its chips described as Intel CPU “foils.”
After all, with Intel having released the Core M mobile CPU, and prepared to launch other Broadwell units by the end of the year, this would be the point where AMD would make its counter-offer.
This isn't happening. Instead, Advanced Micro Devices has chosen March 2015 as the arrival date of its next-generation Accelerated Processing Units.
The AMD Carrizo APUs
Carrizo is the codename that the company uses to refer to the products, in-house. The APUs will replace the Kaveri APUs in March 2015.
Those will be the mid-range chips. As far as we can tell, AMD doesn't have any interest in the high-end market, so the Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs will keep running rampant there.
There will be another batch of Carrizo though, which will be known as Carrizo-L and will replace the Beema and Mullins units. The Carrizo-L will supposedly debut in December this year, 2014.
The whole “we don't want our chips to be defined by the rivalry with Intel” bit still applies though, since the Carrizo-L will not be aimed at the Core M. Instead, they will challenge the Intel Pentium and Celeron processors.
The specifications of Carrizo
It's impossible to guess them at this stage, but just because we don't know the exact core counts, or even the model numbers, doesn't mean that we're completely in the dark.
According to some reports, all Carrizo APUs are built from Excavator cores and are fabricated on the 28nm production technology node. Also, they possess controllers for DDR3-2133 memory.
Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Ubuntu and SLED operating systems will be supported across the board, and you can even expect an ARM micro-core somewhere inside, handling the data security.
The number of design wins
This is something even harder to speculate on than the specifications themselves. AMD has had a pretty lame luck when it comes to OEMs, but maybe it will do better this time than it did with Beema/Mullins and everything else.
What remains is to wonder when and where AMD will unveil a true ARM-x86 combo processor. We only know it's in the works, nothing else.