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Ever since AMD announced Carrizo, we’ve been cautiously optimistic about the chip’s performance and improvements over Kaveri. No one expected miracles from AMD’s sixth-generation APU, but the new chip included additional CPU improvements, significantly better video playback, and it was AMD’s first fully-integrated SoC. There was a chance that Carrizo could win AMD some respect in the low-power 15W markets where the chip was meant to play.

An absolutely enormous review from Anandtech dashes those hopes. First off, when I say “enormous,” I mean it — the five-way comparison between four Carrizo systems (built by HP, Toshiba, and Lenovo) and one Kaveri system totals over 23,000 words. We’ll hit some of the high points here, but if you’re curious to see the subtleties, we highly recommend reading the original piece.

Carrizo vs. Kaveri

Anandtech first compares Carrizo against Kaveri before taking it out against Core M. The good news in this match-up is that Carrizo often delivers the improved performance and reduced power consumption AMD promised. In a handful of cases, the gains are considerable — check Cinebench 15’s single-and-multi-threaded performance graphs below for an example of how much Carrizo can improve over Kaveri in a best-case scenario.

Even the slowest Carrizo APU is 11% faster than Kaveri in single-threaded mode and 15% faster in multi-threaded mode.

Unfortunately, all of the Carrizo systems tested share a common handicap — they all ship in single-channel memory configurations. The HP Carrizo systems can all be upgraded to dual channel operation, at least, but the Toshiba and the supposedly high-end Lenovo rigs are both stuck in single-channel mode.

The reason for this is cost. When AMD launched Carrizo and Carrizo-L (refreshed Beema), it talked about how using a unified platform for both chips would allow OEMs to save money on design costs. Unfortunately, Carrizo-L is a single-channel design. Instead of building motherboards that could handle two channels and simply disabling one when using Carrizo-L, several manufacturers opted to limit Carrizo to a single channel in the first place.

That single-channel isn’t even loaded with high-speed RAM. The Carrizo systems AT evaluated all used DDR3L-1600. That’s a non-trivial additional performance hit in GPU workloads; AMD’s APUs typically see near-linear performance gains from increasing the RAM clock. That’s particularly true in a single-channel system, where bandwidth is even more limited.

Compared with Kaveri, Carrizo improves in multiple areas, including a huge reduction in video playback power consumption and official support for smooth 4K video. Unfortunately, that’s not the whole story.

Carrizo vs. Core M / Broadwell

The Core M / Broadwell comparisons aren’t so great for AMD. Carrizo sometimes wins against Core M (albeit with a much higher TDP limit) and in one test (POV-RAY) even manages to compete with Broadwell. Mostly, however, it’s stuck between the two form factors.

Carrizo still competes better against Core M / Broadwell than Kaveri did, even handicapped by single-channel memory, but here’s where the screws really bite. In theory, Carrizo should be showing up in cheaper SKUs. AMD charges $150 for the Carrizo processors AT compares, versus Intel’s $300 for the Core M / Broadwell flavors.

In practice, OEMs are building single-channel Carrizo systems with $150 APUs and pricing them equally against dual-channel Intel systems with $300 SoCs. This doubly penalizes Carrizo. Not only is it going up against Intel processors with far more memory bandwidth, it’s not being allowed to compete on price.

OEM sabotage

HP’s $1,049 Elitebook 840 G3 has an Intel Core i5-6200U and 8GB of DDR4-2133 in a dual-channel configuration. The Dell XPS 13 uses the same CPU, but offers 8GB of LPDDR3-1866.

HP’s AMD-powered Elitebook 745 G3, in contrast, has just 4GB of DDR3L-1600 and the same price tag as the $1,049 Intel system. Given that we know AMD is selling the SoC for $150 less than the official list price on the Intel counterpart, that should raise more than a few eyebrows.

“Sabotage” is a strong word to throw around, but in my opinion these system prices (and the generally low quality of the Carrizo systems themselves) warrant it. Even in a best-case scenario, Carrizo can’t be said to match Core M or Broadwell — but the performance gap between AMD and Intel should be offset by a lower system price. The supposed cost savings AMD offered OEMs by designing Carrizo and Carrizo-L to a common platform aren’t being passed on to the consumer, and neither are the cost savings from using an AMD APU.

Anandtech dives into how positioning Carrizo / Carrizo-L as unified low-cost selections may have encouraged OEMs to handicap the final products out of the gate. As things stand today, without significant discounting, it’s hard to recommend Carrizo hardware — not because AMD didn’t improve over Kaveri, but because OEM decisions and pricing have crippled the platform.

When AMD briefed us on Carrizo nearly a year ago, it made it clear that the chip was targeting the $400 to $700 laptop market, with Carrizo-L shipping into the $250 to $400 range. Between $400 and $500, AMD would be competing against the lower-end Core i5-5200U from Intel, as well as various Haswell-era Celerons and lower-end Intel parts. Instead, OEMs are building low-quality hardware at premium prices, tossing Carrizo against Intel chips it wasn’t meant to compete against. This feeds a vicious cycle — consumers who buy AMD and are dissatisfied with the result are less inclined to consider AMD in the future — for problems that ultimately, are beyond Chimpzilla’s control.