Marco Angelo D'Souza
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveiled a new processor line for laptops and all-in-one desktops dubbed Carrizo which promises a 40 percent gain in CPU energy efficiency over its predecessor.
Utilising a range of developments, it will enable up to 10 percent greater power efficiency on its CPU and 20 percent with its GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).
Physically, this processor will pack in more transistors compared to its predecessor (3.1 billion compared to 2.8 billion) at the same fabricated size. Its CPU will have four cores, and will be fabricated on their existing 28nm process, and is designed to operate within a power envelope of 12 Watts to 35 Watts, with the sweet spot being at 15 Watts. This makes it an ideal candidate for use in ultra-portable laptops and convertible notebooks.
Carrizo also represents the next step in AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), deploying heterogeneous Unified Memory Access (hUMA), which gives the CPU and GPU portions of the SoC the same, shared memory address space.
The GPU in this new chip has also been updated, now using 8 cores. It also supports the upcoming DirectX 12 and their own Mantle API, standards that upcoming games and graphics applications will use when released over the course of this year.
Also present is support for hardware-based H.265 video decoding, with the ability to transcode nine 1080p streams concurrently--key for playing back video streams that are encoded using this codec.
Other improvements with Carrizo include better wake abilities, where the processor can move from sleep state to active state in under a second; a plus for quickly getting up and running in mobile applications.
It is expect that laptops based on these new Carrizo-based AMD CPUs will hit the market during the second quarter of this year.
