AMD To Release New High-Performance Carrizo Chip By Mid-Year

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AMD’s new Carrizo chip will compete with Intel’s quad-core Broadwell chip

The chip wars are heating up. Semiconductor manufacturers Intel and AMD are continuing their decades-long battle, with the latter now introducing their next-generation A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit for laptops and low-power desktops. The new chip, named “Carrizo”, is designed to significantly increase energy efficiency as well as boost device performance.

The new chip is an x86 APU built with 28-nanometer architecture and is optimized for both power and area efficiency. Carrizo is expected to bed seen inside notebooks and mid-range PCs this summer. Advanced Micro Devices recently released some additional data about the new chip at International Solid State Circuits Conference.

Of note, rival Intel is anticipated to start delivering its new quad-core Broadwell processors in late spring-early summer.

More on the Carrizo chip

AMD has found new ways to save power by better optimizing the voltages used by the chip. Carrizo uses voltage adaptive operation functions in the CPU and the GPU to be able to control power at the nanosecond, with virtually no reduction in computing performance. The company notes that this reduces the power used by the GPU by up to 10%, and that of the CPU by up to 19%.

Of note, Carrizo also includes an innovative power technology called adaptive voltage and frequency scaling. AVFS involves the use of silicon speed capability sensors as well as voltage sensors in tandem with industry-standard temperature and power sensors so as to “enable each individual APU to adapt to its particular silicon characteristics, platform behavior, and operating environment.”

The company claims that AVFS can lead to a 30% reduction in power use.

Statement from AMD

“As a part of our continued focus on building great products, the advanced power and performance optimizations we have designed into our upcoming Carrizo APU will deliver the largest generational performance-per-watt gain ever for a mainstream AMD APU,” commented Sam Naffziger, AMD Corporate Fellow and co-author of the AMD presentation at ISSCC.

Naftziger continued to note: “The upcoming Carrizo APU takes a big step toward the AMD 25×20 energy efficiency goal and incorporates a wealth of new features that will be adopted across our full product line going forward.”

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