APU promises better gaming performance and battery life at an affordable price
While many PC enthusiasts are undoubtedly excited about AMD's new Fiji graphics card, the company is also hard at work pushing the limits of its accelerated processing units, and today officially unveiled its sixth-generation APUs, codenamed Carrizo.
Carrizo promises better battery life and faster gaming performance.
Leading the charge is the company’s new flagship APU, the A10-7870K. It's a DX12-compatible APU that AMD says beats a PC with a mobile i3 processor coupled with Nvidia Geforce GT 740 graphics in popular gaming applications such as DOTA 2, StarCraft II, and CS:GO.
AMD Business Units CTO Joe Macri and AMD Product Manager Scott Stankard talk Carrizo.
In terms of specs, it's running on a 28nm process, has four CPU cores, eight GPU cores, and two channels of DDR3 memory. It also meets the Heterogeneous System Architecture spec, to take advantage of programs that support HSA compute. It also supports AMD's TrueAudio. While we love the surround sound tech, it is admittedly a little less exciting to hear considering the limited library of games that actually support it.
Carrizo is optimized for a low (15-watt) TDP.
With Carrizo, AMD's primary goal is pushing performance per watt, which the company says it really had to be aggressive with considering the flagship A10-7870K is running on a low-powered 15-watt part. It says it was able to get away with this largely in part by doubling the L1 data cache, without seeing any negative impact to latency. AMD was also able to reduce power consumption by 2x through better clock gating. The end result is more performance than AMD's previous 35-watt Kaveri APU, at less than half the TDP.
Despite being a low-powered APU, AMD is boasting a 2x graphics performance advantage over Intel's i7 integrated graphics solution ,and is pushing the notion that gaming really is possible at 15 watts. AMD also claims that its performance-per-watt tactics have also allowed it to increase battery life by 2x, particularly as it pertains to video-watching battery life.
While you might roll your eyes at the thought of an APU, AMD's internal data suggest that the $400–700 notebook range is the most popular, one that yields 63 million customers every year. While Carrizzo may not be a performance rocketship across the board, AMD is designing the APU to handle the majority of popular tasks, whether it be gaming, 4K video viewing, or providing all-day battery life, reasonably well.
Carrizo promises better battery life.
Carrizo notebooks will begin to ship to retail outlets today.
From maximumpc
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