AMD Details Carrizo Architecture, Promises Big Gains in Battery Life

AMD has high hopes for its energy-efficient Carrizo System-on-Chip (SoC) for laptops and low power desktops. The Sunnyvale Chip designer wants you to be optimistic as well, and so it shared several details about Carrizo's architecture at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), saying that Carrizzo will deliver a bunch of advanced power management technologies while also delivering substantial performance by way of new Excavator x86 CPU cores and a new generation of Radeon GPU cores.

On the technical side, Carrizo will feature 29 percent more transistors (3.1 billion total) in nearly the same die size as its predecessor, Kaveri. AMD also says its Excavator x86 cores provide an uplift in instructions per clock at 40 percent less power, hence the claim that Carrizo will offer double digit percentage increases in both performance and battery life.

The new GPU cores will have a dedicated power supply. In addition, there's a dedicated on-chip H.265 video decode for true 4K resolution support. And for the first time ever on a high performance AMD APU, there will be an integrated Southbridge, the company said.

AMD had to be a bit creative to cram several new technologies into Carrizo. As the company explains, microprocessor designs typically supply excess voltage -- up to 10 to 15 percent -- to account for transient drops in voltage known as droop. To avoid having to go that route, AMD said it developed a number of technologies to optimize voltage. In addition, Carrizo compares the average voltage to droops on the order of nanoseconds,

"Since the frequency adjustments are done at the nanosecond level, there’s almost no compromise in computing performance, while power is cut by up to 10 percent on the GPU and up to 19 percent on the CPU," AMD said.

Carrizo will also be HSA 1.0 compliant, which translates into the GPU being able to perform compute tasks.

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