AMD Announces 6th Generation A-Series APU Branding - Carrizo Due This Quarter
by Ryan Smith on May 6, 2015 2:21 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- APUs
- AMD FAD 2015
Along with AMD’s roadmap announcements today at financial analyst day, AMD has also offered a brief update on the state of Carrizo, the company’s forthcoming next-generation mobile APU. Due for launch this year, AMD has just confirmed that Carrizo is ramping well and will be launching this quarter, though SKU details are not being provided at this time.
Meanwhile, AMD is also using the opportunity to announce their intended branding for Carrizo notebooks. These products will now be known as the 6th generation A-series, and will be featuring revised AMD badges to indicate this. AMD will be retaining the current FX/A10/A8 branding, with the only real change being the inclusion of the “6th generation” branding on the badges.
Badging aside, AMD still will have to face the fact that they’re launching a 28nm notebook APU versus Intel’s 14nm notebook CPUs, the company is once again banking on their strong GPU performance to help drive sales. Coupled with the combination of low power optimizations in Carrizo and full fixed-function hardware decoding of HEVC, and AMD will be relying on Carrizo to carry them through to 2016 and Zen.
Finally, though it will come a bit later in the year, AMD’s FAD update has also briefly mentioned their plans for their AMD Pro lineup and how Carrizo will impact it. In short, AMD will be leaning on a combination of Carrizo’s power gains, and their own security technology as found in the Pro APUs.
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Xailter - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Oh c'mon AMD - why are these still on 28nm? :(Novacius - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Probably because it's too early for 14nm and 20nm might not be a huge enough improvement in terms of energy efficiency, let alone cost.MrCommunistGen - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Other than mobile SoCs, NAND, and anything Intel (who has their own fabs), has anything been manufactured on a sub-28nm yet?My guess is that TSMC and GF still do not have a suitable sub-28nm process for compute hardware. I can see this being due to any one or combination of the following:
fabs optimized for mobile
fabs do not have available volume
fabs have poor yields
pricing is too high
Arguably, several of those are interrelated.
menting - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
MrCommunistGen, you forgot DRAM.kyuu - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Because AMD has no control over the process. That is entirely up to the fabs, and TSMC and GloFo are lagging.Xailter - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
I know they don't own their own fabs anymore, I just find it... disappointing :-/Taneli - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link
Their old fab arm Globalfoundries has failed to deliver compared to Intel, just like the industry leader TSMC. Fabless companies like AMD are at the mercy of their supplierstestbug00 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Er, IBM would be the industry leader outside of Intel before they sold their foundries to GloFo. TSMC was the leader for commercial until 28nm. Samsung spent more money for 20/14-16FF than TSMC and is now the industry leader.GloFo is licensing Samsung 14FF process... Hence, will be ahead of TSMC.
Pissedoffyouth - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
How about a desktop APU I can drop into my FM2 mboard?Mr Perfect - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
So what happens further down the line in the A6 and A4 areas? Nothing? I was hoping they'd have something nice for the little 10" to 12" ultra-portable machines.