AMD’s Carrizo @ ISSCC 2015

After reading up on AMD’s Carrizo APU my take away are as follows:

Carrizo will consume less power in active and idle states while outperforming Kaveri. It’s too early to tell if this will be enough to match Intel’s Broadwell or even Haswell in performance per watt. But it should at the very least continue closing the gap.

Carrizo’s die size is within a few mm2 of Kaveri. Given that Llano was 228mm2, Trinity and Richland were both 246mm2, Kaveri was 245mm2, and Carzzio is about the same size as Trinity; we can safely say that AMD is consistently producing mainstream APUs with a die size of about ~250mm2. This trend will likely continue in future generations.

The most important IP for AMD coming out of the continued development of the Bulldozer family are technologies like voltage adaptive operation, the reduced clocking network, and their highly granular power management engine (AVFS) all of which address power efficiency end of the equation rather than raw performance. These are the technologies that are going to turn up in Zen.

Carrizo is a much better realized effort technically than Kaveri which had significant development troubles. It’s a gap filler for AMD’s next generation products and a test bed for AMD’s HDL; although its a potent offering nonetheless.

System-on-chip designs are not only the way of the future but they are here to stay. If you aren’t pumping out SoC products you are not going to survive. Expect performance and power consumption variations between the same chip on different motherboards to continue decreasing.

Given Intel’s missteps with Broadwell, AMD will gain some marketshare in the sub-$600 laptop segment over the course of 2015 thanks to Carrizo.

Reading Carrizo makes me want some Tacos. Charizo to be exact.

Here’s my reading list if you want more:

AMD outs a few Carrizzo circuitry details

AMD at ISSCC 2015: Carrizo and Excavator Details

AMD previews Carrizo APU, offers insights into power savings

AMD Releases more Carrizo Details: AMD’s ISSCC 2015 Presentation

AMD’s Carrizo System-on-Chip: more transistors, more performance, less power