At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), AMD has introduced the upcoming A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), codenamed “Carrizo” for notebooks and low-power desktops. This will deliver new, advanced power management technologies while achieving substantial performance through new “Excavator” x86 CPU cores and a new generation of AMD Radeon GPU cores. As compared to the prior generation APU, Carrizo will reduce the power consumed by the x86 cores alone by 40 per cent, while also providing substantial gains in CPU, graphics, and multimedia performance. The new-generation AMD Radeon GPU core is using System-on-Chip (SoC) design.
Sam Naffziger, AMD Corporate Fellow and co-author of the AMD presentation at ISSCC, said, “As a part of our continued focus on building great products, the advanced power and performance optimizations we have designed into our upcoming ‘Carrizo’ APU will deliver the largest generational performance-per-watt gain ever for a mainstream AMD APU.” He further added, “AMD has been pursuing Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) and proprietary power management technologies to make continued gains. The upcoming ‘Carrizo’ APU takes a big step toward the AMD 25x20 energy-efficiency goal and incorporates a wealth of new features that will be adopted across our full product line, going forward.”
New high-density design libraries allowed AMD to fit 29 per cent more transistors on Carrizo – 3.1 billion – in nearly the same chip size as the previous generation, Kaveri APU. This density increase has allowed a larger area for graphics, multimedia offload, and integration of the “Southbridge” system controller on a single-chip. AMD has developed a number of technologies to optimize voltage.
In addition to helping reduce power use on the CPU by shrinking the core area, AMD worked to optimize the 28nm technology for power efficiency, and tuned the GPU implementation for optimal operation in power limited scenarios. This has enabled up to a 20% power reduction over the Kaveri graphics at the same frequency.
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