Thursday, 4 December 2014

AMD Unveils Carrizo Chip

he mobile industry is now one of the biggest platforms to develop for. So much so that traditional PC business are clambering to leave a mark. Intel have made the move and it now looks like AMD are furthering their hold on the market.  They are also developing their own system-on-chip or application processing unit (APU), which will power tablets and laptops.
AMD showcased the chip at their Future of Compute event. The chip maker has revealed the Carrizo; a high performance chip, and another, less powerful Carrizo-L chip. The Carrizo will come with next gen Radeon graphics, whilst the Carrizo-L will come with the older GCN-baseed Radeon R-series. Both the two chips will apparently be ready to ship and will be integrated into devices in the second quarter of 2015.
The Carrizo isn’t AMD’s first crack at this game, in fact the new chip succeeds the previous Kaveri APU that was announced last year. According to AMD, this chip is the first high-performance version, though. The Carrizo is going to be the first chip to fully comply with version 1.0 of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). Basically, the CPU and GPU will work in tandem to handle computational loads. This HSA achievement from AMD’s is due to the fact that it manufactures both the CPU and the GPU (from the ATI acquisition).
An important factor in mobile and embedded devices is the amount of energy usage. This is an often criticised area where Intel’s mobile chips are concerned. AMD’s chips still employ the 28nm manufacturing process, so the power usage might not be as substantially lower as AMD would like us to believe.
The AMD Carrizo and the Carrizo-L are currently undergoing internal testing by AMD and the firm is confident that it will be able to ship these new chips in the second quarter of next year.
Interestingly, the other members of the HSA Foundation, including MediaTek, Qualcomm and Samsung, have yet to come out with a fully 1.0 compliant chip.
[Image via jagatreview]

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