If you skipped reading Scott's look at the new AMD Carrizo processor you have done yourself a disfavour and should read through his look at AMD's recent history and the evolution of Bulldozer and Steamroller into Excavator. It will help you understand The Tech Report's look into the new architecture and the AMD provided benchmarks which you can check out here. A lot of the new architecture is a refinement of previous chips but the Tonga based GPU portion is completely new and looks to be an impressive improvement, especially on these 15W and 30W chips. It will be very interesting to see how they fare against the Iris Pro on Intel's new Broadwell chips in systems without a discrete GPU.
"The Carrizo processor is AMD's follow-on to Kaveri and a direct competitor to Intel's Broadwell CPUs. After a lengthy prelude, AMD is officially taking the wraps off of Carrizo today at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The firm expects laptops based on Carrizo to be available near the end of this month, and now that the chip is official, we know a number of juicy details about it that had previously been murky."
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I would guess AMD has the
I would guess AMD has the more powerful gpu, but Intel will get a big boost from the on-package DRAM. The controller for the eDRAM looks like it takes a lot of die space. AMD may still be stuck competing on price until they get HBM APUs. AMDs part may be quite competive as far as power consumption is concerned. It is nice to see HEVC hardware support.
HEVC is nice but it seems VP9
HEVC is nice but it seems VP9 is missing. Overall probably no better then what recently enabled Intel Haswell acceleration.
Actually one of the more
Actually one of the more thorough reviews for the Carrizo was done on Toms hardware, unusual as Anandtech is usually on top with their reviews, but both sites are owned by the same media holding company. Scott was true to his usual writing form of not much actual information mixed with some very disjointed writing style. Scott’s grammar and usage would greatly benefit form a senior editor with one of those fat red marker pens. Apparently there is to much on the table with Carrizo for just one article to adequately describe what was done for its manufacture, in addition to its HSA 1.0 compliance, and other tweaks.
There are more than a few articles worth of technological information that need to be gone over, and one of them is a more complete primer/article on just what constitutes full HSA 1.0 compliance, that and the future of using the High density design libraries for any future mobile parts on even smaller process nodes for packing much more transistors for extra CPU cores, or GPU cores, on future tablet/other mobile SKUs. I not implying that all of AMD’s product line should utilize high density libraries, but that on a tablet SKU at 14nm just imagine what extra features could be had with the utilization of high density design libraries that can give any mobile SKU around an extra 29% more space in addition to a 14nm shrink for low power mobile parts. Now imagine a mobile Zen SKU done on a high density design library, not necessarily a PC/Laptop SKU, but a tablet SKU that would probably have to thermally constrain any part manufactured using a standard CPU design library anyways! AMD could probably fit a lot more GPU resources on a tablet SKU, epically one done on 14nm in addition to getting the 29% extra density from using the high density library. AMD could definitely have a mobile part with much more than 512 SP in its GPU area to go along with 4 Zen based cores.
There appears to be not so much buzz around Carrizo, with other news from Intel, and the GPU side announcements from AMD drawing attention away from Carrizo, But there is a lot of new technology in Carrizo that have implications for future AMD products than just Carrizo being more of a transitional last of its microarchitectural design, before Zen is released, and more of the press not grasping the number new technological features brought online in Carrizo’s manufacture. HSA is definitely a complicated subject that has some great implications but has been greatly misunderstood, along with other technologies recently introduced by AMD. AMD for lack of funds is still doing some interesting engineering, but I guess it’s mostly going to be as little attention to technology as possible while trying to create just enough buzz to make those sales that pay the bills.