As CES winds down for another year, one of the companies we want to touch on is AMD and its own plans for the laptop and tablet market through 2015. As we’ve previously discussed, AMD’s roadmap for 2015 revolves around a new SoC, codenamed Carrizo, and its lower-power cousin, Carrizo-L. Both of these chips will share a common form factor, motherboard design, and platform, and both are expected by the middle of 2015.
One issue we need to address, however, is the question of whether these new cores will be built on 28nm or 20nm technology. In the past, we’ve reported that AMD would introduce a 20nm die-shrink of its existing 28nm Puma+ processor (itself a respin of the Jaguar core that launched in 2013). That information came directly from AMD’s own announcements regarding Project Skybridge, its ambitious attempt to build a single platform for both ARM and x86 processors.
To be clear, as far as we know, that’s still true — but I made an assumption that has turned out to be inaccurate. Specifically, I assumed that once AMD had a 20nm version of Puma+ with full HSA compatibility, the company would immediately roll that technology into a standard SoC design for laptops. It’s now clear that AMD isn’t doing that. Both Carrizo and Carrizo-L are going to be 28nm processors.
Carrizo’s improvements, clarifying Carrizo-L
Carrizo is obviously a more significant upgrade over Kaveri than Carrizo-L is over Beema. The only difference between Beema and Carrizo-L on AMD’s roadmap is a platform change, from FT3 BGA to FP4 BGA. FP3 BGA was the equivalent of Socket FM2+ for notebooks; FP4 is presumably designed for the greater degree of power savings, integrated southbridge, and Carrizo’s other power-saving features.
One new feature that AMD demonstrated at CES was the ability to decode H.265 smoothly on a Carrizo-class APU, compared to a Broadwell system struggling under an equivalent workload. Carrizo’s GPU is also reportedly based on and derived from AMD’s Tonga core, which to date has only appeared in a single discrete card, the Radeon R9 285. We’ve long suspected that the R9 285 represented a sort of GCN 1.2, with a new, more efficient front end and support for variable-bit floating point rendering that made the most sense in mobile applications that were highly sensitive to power consumption.
Upcoming features in Carrizo and AMD’s power efficiency projections.
AMD’s decision to manufacture socketed Kabini APUs at GlobalFoundries earlier this year now makes more sense. Moving that core to GlobalFoundries gave AMD time to shift its design to GF’s different manufacturing process before building a second version of the core in a Carrizo-compatible socket. AMD remains bullish on Carrizo’s efficiency and power consumption improvements — it hasn’t said as much about Carrizo-L, or given any indication of how it differs from the current Puma+ core.
As for Project Skybridge, it’s apparently still on schedule and coming in 2015, but without a mobile platform to leverage the new 20nm chip we have to wonder just what kind of uptake AMD is hoping for. The company was supposed to ship its Cortex-A57 “Seattle” server CPUs by the end of 2014, but if it did so, it didn’t make a peep about it. Granted, server announcements don’t command the same kind of attention that consumer-centric parts do, but AMD has made a great deal of noise about how ARM and dense servers are central to its plans to gain new market share. Lisa Su has good reason to emphasize her company’s launches and successes in this area, which makes AMD’s silence all the more puzzling.
AMD Project Skybridge: ARM and x86 chips that are pin-compatible
For now, we’re assuming that Skybridge remains on track for a 2015 debut but it now seems that the 20nm Puma+ core with full HSA support will end up in far fewer hands than we initially expected — and Carrizo, rather than Carrizo-L, seems to be AMD’s major launch story headed into 2015.
Now read: The best, worst, and most innovative PCs and components of 2014
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AMD’s Carrizo and Carrizo-L are both 28nm, mobile-only processors
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