One of the important press releases that came out as a result of the AMD Financial Analyst Day has been some insights into how AMD is approaching the Carrizo and Carrizo-L platform. Have a read of Ryan’s round up of the Financial Analyst Day, which included some broad details about Zen and the big x86 cores, but Carrizo and Carrizo-L focus on AMD’s mobile strategy as well as describing the next iterations of the Bulldozer architecture (Excavator) and the Cat family of low power SoCs (Puma+). We covered some of AMD’s releases on Carrizo back in February, but despite the similar name Carrizo-L functions for a slightly different market by virtue of the different architecture.

Carrizo-L features ‘Puma+’, which by virtue of the naming scheme suggests an updated version of Puma which was seen in Beema. What the ‘plus’ part of the name means has not been disclosed, as both Puma and Puma+ are reported to be 28nm, but chances are that the design has attacked the low hanging fruit in the processor design, rather than purely just a frequency bump. Carrizo-L will be advertised under the new ‘AMD 7000 Series’ APUs, featuring up to four low power separate cores up to 2.5GHz, up to 25W and up to DDR3-1866 support. These are aimed square at the Atom ecosystem within a similar power budget.

AMD Carrizo-L
  A8-7410 A6-7310 A4-7210 E2-7110 E1-7010
Cores / Threads 4 / 4 4 / 4 4 / 4 4 / 4 2 / 2
CPU Frequency Up to 2.5 GHz Up to 2.4 GHz Up to 2.2 GHz Up to 1.8 GHz Up to 1.5 GHz
TDP 12-25W 12-25W 12-25W 12-15W 10W
L2 Cache 2MB 2MB 2MB 2MB 1MB
DRAM Frequency DDR3L-1866 DDR3L-1600 DDR3L-1600 DDR3L-1600 DDR3L-1333
Radeon Graphics R5 R4 R3 'Radeon' 'Radeon'
Streaming Processors 128 ? 128 ? 128 ? 128 ? 128 ?
GPU Frequency Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown

AMD is stating that these APUs are currently available in Greater China already with a global rollout commencing in due course. All APUs are listed with AMD Radeon graphics, although the Rx number has no indication as to the streaming processors in the graphics part – a similar situation happened with Beema, and all those parts came with 128 SPs, differing only in frequency which is likely the case here. The SoC design also ensures all the IO is onboard, including an AMD Secure Processor, which for Puma was a Cortex-A5 supporting ARM TrustZone. It is likely that Carrizo-L also uses only a single memory channel, similar to Beema.

One of the more interesting elements is that Carrizo and Carrizo-L will share a socket, known as FP4. This means the processors are pin compatible, and what we know about Carrizo at this point suggests that both segments will play within the same sort of power budget (10-25W vs 15-35W). This allows OEMs to build two designs with almost identical hardware under the hood except for the SoC – would you prefer a single/dual Excavator design, or a faster frequency quad-core Puma+ design? There also leaves scope for differential integrated graphics performance, as mobile Kaveri up to 25W had up to 384 SPs or 3x what we are expecting with Carrizo-L. A lot of the performance metrics in this part will be down to binning the various designs, which adjusts the cost.

At some point we will source a Carrizo-L low-power notebook in order to test the hardware – it would be an interesting data point to get a corresponding Carrizo design as well.

Source: AMD

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  • movax2 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link

    In my opinion 10-W quad-core Carrizo-L would make more sense. Clock can be pretty low but with agressive Turbo it will be actually good solution.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link

    Problem: the cat cores never had good and agressive turbo. Which is why they either have "large" TDPs or low clock speeds, but nothing like Silvermonts turbo giving +50% single threaded performance.
  • movax2 - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link

    Actually Mullins (Puma) cores has agressive Turbo. 1.2 GHz -> 2.2 GHz. And that's all for SDP ~ 2.8 W. TDP 4.5 W.
  • silverblue - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link

    Well, SDP != TDP. As always, it will be power consumption tests that will tell all.
  • Kalelovil - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link

    @Ian Cutress

    "Carrizo-L features ‘Puma+’, which by virtue of the naming scheme suggests an updated version of Puma which was seen in Beema."

    Beema/Mullins already had Puma+ cores.
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/7974/amd-beema-mulli...

    I highly suspect Carrizo-L is just a repackaging of the Beema/Mullins SoC in a new socket.
  • Visual - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link

    So, can someone tell me in simple words what this all means for me?
    Specifically, I'm ignoring anything Atom and even Core M, Y etc due to pathetic GPUs. I do not want a step back from the Intel HD 4400 of my Surface Pro 2. Now that Broadwell is out, I guess the new reasonable minimum, or the thing to beat for AMD is the HD 5500.
    Can AMD offer better GPU performance in a similar power envelope? And will someone finally make a decent tablet with their part?
  • sonicmerlin - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link

    The power consumption of these chips is too high to put in a tablet.
  • Visual - Thursday, May 14, 2015 - link

    Sorry, but no, 15W TDP is not too high.
    I even mentioned a tablet that has similar CPUs in it - Surface Pro 2. Pro 3 also has variants with i5 with a HD 4400, despite also having weaker i3 variants.
  • Aseda1011 - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link

    Just realized a ps4 is 2 E2 7110 but with 9 times more shaders 1152/9=128
  • medi03 - Friday, May 15, 2015 - link

    I hope there will be at least one notebook model out there with this APU and IPS screen...

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