Who Controls the User Experience? AMD’s Carrizo Thoroughly Tested
by Ian Cutress on February 4, 2016 8:00 AM ESTNo Room at the Win
The interesting thing about laptop design is that for the most part we are dealing with a number of devices with the same level of power consumption. This means that given sufficient standards, the same laptop shell - be it plastic, aluminium or something a bit more exotic - should be able to house different components that operate at a similar TDP, all with similar battery capacities. Thus if a company gets a ‘win’ with a laptop design, then an equivalent TDP processor from the competition (again, there are other factors involved such as controllers and z-height) should be able to work well in that same device.
But one key differentiator between Intel and AMD however is the consistent level of halo devices available with each manufacturer's hardware. It doesn't take long to find the evolutions of Intel's Ultrabook line that focus on high performance, and other premium devices designed to hit a certain combination of thickness and battery life, such as ASUS' Zenbook line or the Apple Macbook Air. In the tablet space, Intel has had design wins with the Microsoft Surface line as well as others, especially premium devices. These are all high volume, highly advertised product lines available in almost every market and not hard to find. In the case of the three mentioned above, some are household names and all of them are well known in the technical media zeitgeist.
HP Elitebook, one of the more premium designs with AMD inside
However, if AMD is mentioned in a similar vein, it is difficult to draw a single conclusion or the name of a premium or otherwise well-known laptop model from memory unless you happen to either work directly with AMD marketing or you are the product manager at a parner OEM. There have been no design wins or public contracts with AMDs mobile processors, and no big halo products that champion both performance and industrial design in a single device. As a result there has to be an element of questioning here. Are OEMs unwilling to use AMD? Do AMD products have a bad reputation? Is there something inherent with the name or product that makes OEMs reluctant, or users to withhold their purchases? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the processor? As is often the case, the predicted answer to this question is a mixed bag.
Carrizo over Kaveri
As mentioned previously, Carrizo is the name for the family of APUs that use AMDs fourth iteration of the Bulldozer architecture, Excavator. Carrizo is built on GlobalFoundries' 28nm process node and comes inline with AMDs recent renegotiation of contracts regarding the scale and scope of the APU product line. Carrizo APUs will be available in 15W variants, which reflects the focus of the architecture update as well as the change in metal stack arrangement incorporated for this family to optimize transistor density. Meanwhile the higher-end models will have an available TDP-Up mode of 35W in order to increase performance, although this is at the discretion of the OEM. AMD for their part has already stated that their primary use case for Carrizo is at 15W, as 35W is the point where the Carrizo's power optimizations aren't quite as efficient and the performance of previous generation APUs will intersect with Carrizo (when talking raw CPU, rather than other benefits Carrizo has).
In launching Carrizo, AMD was clear on the target market for this APU - laptops in the $400-$700 range. It has been pointed out by media and analysts that this market segment represents an opportunity for AMD to fit between Intel's low power/high performance/high cost Core-M line of processors, the low power/low performance/low cost Atom line and the higher power/medium cost Core i3. According to AMD, this segment represents 40% of all laptop sales, covering users who want more than a budget device but something below the high costs of a premium device.
Meanwhile AMDs secondary aim with Carrizo is to offer premium level performance in certain applications at a lower price point by using Carrizo's stance as the first CPU architecture to be ratified against the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) standards. As a result, AMD had been working with software developers in order to leverage HSA benefits in specific code bases and subsequently improve in performance, particularly with software of widespread importance, such as Adobe and LibreOffice.
Carrizo is a true system-on-chip (SoC), integrating the CPU, the GPU, and the input/output hub all on one piece of silicon (and thus one package). This leads to several direct benefits - reducing the power consumption of the I/O hub by bringing it down to the same process node as the main processor, allowing different areas of the SoC to be power gated under a single control system rather than recreating power delivery networks around the system, and ease of use when it comes to HSA requiring less data to travel around external buses.
AMDs main competitor in the mobile processor space, disregarding tablets for the moment and devices like Surface RT/Chromebook Pixel, is Intel. Intel, like AMD, leverages an x86 CPU design with integrated graphics on the same die. Thanks to a combination of many years of experience with graphics and designs intentionally favoring high performance integrated GPUs, AMDs main positive point of performance in recent generations has been the integrated graphics arena, where they win out typically in terms of graphics performance/cost and graphics performance/power metrics. Thus a number of improvements to Carrizo over previous architectures relate to graphics use - either using it more with HSA or offloading certain workloads to dedicated IP to keep more of the SoC at an idle state.
Carrizo’s design allows AMD to add two more graphics compute units (+33%) at 15W compared to Kaveri at a similar frequency, which combined with IPC increases in the processor has led to some interesting claims for performance. These claims have been picked up by casual readers and OEMs alike.
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karakarga - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Including all, AMD and nVidia both at their funeral state! They can not possibly open 22, 14, 10 etc. micron fabric.Intel spended 5 billion dollars to open their new Arizona factory, they will pass lower processes there as well. AMD and nVidia can not get, even a billion dollar profit in these years. It is impossible for them to spend that much money to a new low process factory.
Those little tweaks can not help them to survive....
testbug00 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
They don't build factories. TSMC and Samsung (and GloFo to a lesser extent) build factories and do R&D for these processes. Nvidia, AMD. Samsung, Qualcomm, MediaTek and many other companies design chips to the standards of TSMC/Samsung/GloFo and pay money for wafers and running the wafers through the fab.The cost for this per wafer is meant to get all that money back in a few years. And than the process keeps on running for over 10 years sometimes.
It is getting more expensive to get to smaller nodes and the performance increase and power decrease is getting smaller. And costs more to design chips and run wafers. So it is getting harder to find the funds to shrink. Which is one of the reasons Intel has delayed their 10nm process.
yannigr2 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Thanks for this review. Really needed for sometime. It was missing from the internet, not just Anandtech.As for the laptops, they say as much as there is to tell. Small Chinese makers, who no one knows they exist, would built better laptops than these. HP, Toshiba and Lenovo in this case, multibillion international giants that seems have all the technicians and the R&D funds necessary, end up producing Laptops with "strange" limitations, bad choices, low quality parts and in the end put prices that, even with all those bad choices and limitations, are NOT lower than those on Intel alternatives. It's almost as if Intel makes the choices for the parts in those laptops. Maybe their is a "trololol" sticker on them somewhere hidden addressed to AMD. I guess that way those big OEM don't make Intel too angry and at the same time, if there is another legal battle between AMD and Intel in the future, they will have enough excuses to show to the judge in their defense, if accused that they supported a monopoly.
ToTTenTranz - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
This article is what makes Anandtech great. Just keep being like this guys, your work is awesome!I'm going to spend some time clicking your ads, you deserve it :)
As for the "poll" about who's to blame, IMHO it is:
1 - AMD for letting OEMs place Carrizo in designs with terrible panels and single-channel solutions. It's just not good for the brand. "You can't put a Carrizo with single-channel cheap RAM because that's not how it was designed. You want to build bottom-of-the-barrel laptop? We have Carrizo-L for you."
I'm pretty sure Intel has this conversation regarding Core M and Atom/Pentium/Celeron solutions. I know AMD is in a worse solution to negotiate, but downplaying Carrizo like this isn't good for anyone but Intel.
In the end, what AMD needs is a guy who can properly sell their product. Someone who convince the OEMs that good SoCs need to be paired with decent everything-else.
$500 is plenty for a 12/13" IPS/VA screen (even if it's 720/800p), 128GB SSD and 4+4GB DDR3L. Why not pull a Microsoft's Surface and build a decent SKU for that price range so that other OEMs can follow? Contract one OEM to make the device they envisioned, sell it and see all others following suit.
2 - OEMs for apparently not having this ONE guy who calls the shots and knows that selling a crappy system automatically means losing customers. And this ONE other guy (or the same) for not knowing that constantly favoring Intel with their solutions is bound to make the whole company's life miserable if Intel's only competitor kicks the bucket. The consumer isn't meant to know these things, but the OEMs certainly are.
It's 2016. We're way past the age of tricking the customer to buy a terrible user experience through big numbers (like "1TB drive woot"). He/She will feel like the money just wasn't and next time will buy a mac.
Want a $300-400 price point? Get a Carrizo-L with a 128GB SSD and a 720p IPS panel. Want $500-700 Price point? Get a Carrizo with dual-channel, 256GB SSD and 900p/1080p IPS screen.
joex4444 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Anything under 1080p is simply not usable. All these 1366x768 panels are just awful. I have an old netbook with one (12.1") and I've put a small SSD in there and loaded it with Ubuntu. I cannot have a Google Hangouts window open and a web browser open wide enough to view most pages. Basic web browsing + IM - 1366x768 completely fails at the task.testbug00 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
768p panels are fine if they are good quality, in 11" laptops.900p good up to 13", and 1080p minimum for 14+.
Honestly I wish we stayed with 8:5 14x9, 16x10, 19x12z
jabber - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Indeed, 768p is fine on my 11" Samsung Chromebook but I would not tolerate it on anything bigger. IMO 1600x900 should be the minimum screen res for budget machines. 1080p for midrange and whatever you like for higher end.jjpcat@hotmail.com - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Resolution is not as important as the quality of the panel. I used a Lenovo X1 Carbon. It has a 14" 1080p screen. But it's a TN panel and that just makes it a pain in the ass. I am amazed that Lenovo uses such a lousy panel in its $1k+ laptop while some 10" sub-$200 tablets use IPS.testbug00 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Toshiba can make a $400 chromebook with a good 1080p display. Fully agreed.1080p panel, make it thicker so you can put a larger battery and so the laptop can handle up to 35W from the APU. Do dual channel.
When plugged change APU power mad to 35W, when in battery make it 15W. Probably can be done for $500 for a 15" laptop with an A8. $50/100 upgrade to 128/256GB SSD and $50/100 upgrade to A10/FX.
Dobson123 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
"The APU contains integrated ‘R6’ level graphics based on GCN 1.0, for 384 streaming processors at a frequency of 533 MHz."Isn't it GCN 1.1?