AMD Carizzo APU Specs detailed

AMD's Excavator APU

| Source: vr-zone Author: Mark Campbell

Next Generation APU

After AMD's CORE Evolution Video yesterday, it got us looking into AMD's next Generation Carizzo APUs with interest. Now thanks to the Chinese website VR-Zone we have some tasty information to share with you all regarding AMD's Excavator based APU, so lets get started.

What we have is a slide from AMD and a Carizzo Block diagram shown below. From this we can tell that it will be very similar to it's predecessors, CPU Cores of the Bulldozer line, 8 GCN GPU units, the same 28nm processing node and support for Dual channel DDR3 memory. Note that AMD decided not to support the newer DDR4 standard, which is obviously due to the increased platform cost of using DDR4 memory as AMD's APU linup has always been a budget friendly offering.

The 2 Excavator modules inside make up the CPUs 4 Cores, which is said to give a 30% performance gain compared to last generation parts at 15W TDPs. This means that compared to last Generation these APUs will no doubt be impressive, especially given the efficiency of current Kabini CPUs. The performance gains for higher wattage CPUs remains unknown, but it will more than likely be less than 30%.

Another thing to note on the CPU side is that there has been a decrease in L2 cache from 4MB on the Kaveri to 2MB on Carizzo. This may be due to Die Size issues, or perhaps AMD removing unnecessary cache from the APU. This may reduce the performance of the APU, especially in scenarios that enjoy using a larger amount of cache. Hopefully this does not lead to a situation where AMD's current offerings can perform better than their next generation in certain situations.

GCN 3.0

This APU as said previously will use 8 GCN generation 3.0 compute units, which is 512 Stream processors in total. It will also feature a greater memory controller and a new high speed bus to connect the x86 CPU, Ram and graphics cores together, which should improve general GPU performance and significantly improve the performance benefits of HSA (heterogeneous system architecture) enhancements.

The GCN 3.0 architecture is also projected to support the DirectX 12 API, but it is unclear whether it will actually support all its new capabilities, or simply just compatible with the API while supporting the current DirectX 11.2 features.

On the display connections standpoint Carizzo will support HDMI 2.0 allowing 4K monitors to be supported at 120Hz, which could make this APU great for a 4K HTPC. Out of the Box Kaveri will be able to support up to 3 monitors, so it will be ideal for general multi-monitor office use.

Closing thoughts

With AMDs Carrizo APU on the same 28nm process node, it is hard to expect too much from this release. AMD have worked hard to improve both the GCN and Bulldozer core architectures, and even how they can connect together, but we cannot expect an increased core count or a breakthrough performance boost.

This means that Carizzo will not bring AMD back into the big leagues of high performance CPUs, but hopefully these gains can make Kaveri a more viable gaming platform or gain just enough performance to not dismissed by Intel's upcoming CPUs.

Join the discussion AMD's Carizzo APU on the OC3D forums.

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