AMD’s Carrizo-L APUs Unveiled: 12-25W Quad Core Puma+
by Ian Cutress on May 12, 2015 5:23 AM EST
One of the important press releases that came out as a result of the AMD Financial Analyst Day has been some insights into how AMD is approaching the Carrizo and Carrizo-L platform. Have a read of Ryan’s round up of the Financial Analyst Day, which included some broad details about Zen and the big x86 cores, but Carrizo and Carrizo-L focus on AMD’s mobile strategy as well as describing the next iterations of the Bulldozer architecture (Excavator) and the Cat family of low power SoCs (Puma+). We covered some of AMD’s releases on Carrizo back in February, but despite the similar name Carrizo-L functions for a slightly different market by virtue of the different architecture.
Carrizo-L features ‘Puma+’, which by virtue of the naming scheme suggests an updated version of Puma which was seen in Beema. What the ‘plus’ part of the name means has not been disclosed, as both Puma and Puma+ are reported to be 28nm, but chances are that the design has attacked the low hanging fruit in the processor design, rather than purely just a frequency bump. Carrizo-L will be advertised under the new ‘AMD 7000 Series’ APUs, featuring up to four low power separate cores up to 2.5GHz, up to 25W and up to DDR3-1866 support. These are aimed square at the Atom ecosystem within a similar power budget.
| AMD Carrizo-L | |||||
| A8-7410 | A6-7310 | A4-7210 | E2-7110 | E1-7010 | |
| Cores / Threads | 4 / 4 | 4 / 4 | 4 / 4 | 4 / 4 | 2 / 2 |
| CPU Frequency | Up to 2.5 GHz | Up to 2.4 GHz | Up to 2.2 GHz | Up to 1.8 GHz | Up to 1.5 GHz |
| TDP | 12-25W | 12-25W | 12-25W | 12-15W | 10W |
| L2 Cache | 2MB | 2MB | 2MB | 2MB | 1MB |
| DRAM Frequency | DDR3L-1866 | DDR3L-1600 | DDR3L-1600 | DDR3L-1600 | DDR3L-1333 |
| Radeon Graphics | R5 | R4 | R3 | 'Radeon' | 'Radeon' |
| Streaming Processors | 128 ? | 128 ? | 128 ? | 128 ? | 128 ? |
| GPU Frequency | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
AMD is stating that these APUs are currently available in Greater China already with a global rollout commencing in due course. All APUs are listed with AMD Radeon graphics, although the Rx number has no indication as to the streaming processors in the graphics part – a similar situation happened with Beema, and all those parts came with 128 SPs, differing only in frequency which is likely the case here. The SoC design also ensures all the IO is onboard, including an AMD Secure Processor, which for Puma was a Cortex-A5 supporting ARM TrustZone. It is likely that Carrizo-L also uses only a single memory channel, similar to Beema.
One of the more interesting elements is that Carrizo and Carrizo-L will share a socket, known as FP4. This means the processors are pin compatible, and what we know about Carrizo at this point suggests that both segments will play within the same sort of power budget (10-25W vs 15-35W). This allows OEMs to build two designs with almost identical hardware under the hood except for the SoC – would you prefer a single/dual Excavator design, or a faster frequency quad-core Puma+ design? There also leaves scope for differential integrated graphics performance, as mobile Kaveri up to 25W had up to 384 SPs or 3x what we are expecting with Carrizo-L. A lot of the performance metrics in this part will be down to binning the various designs, which adjusts the cost.
At some point we will source a Carrizo-L low-power notebook in order to test the hardware – it would be an interesting data point to get a corresponding Carrizo design as well.
Source: AMD
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silverblue - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
He mentioned it in the comments section.MrSpadge - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
This might explain why there are no new cat-cores on the roadmaps shown at the recent FAD.testbug00 - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
Ah. Thanks.rocketbuddha - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
All I know is roughly during the time Jim Keller returned to AMD, John Bruno (the chief architect of APU in the PC/notebook world inside AMD), left for Apple...But in the corporate world, when strategic decisions/future roadmaps are made, it is a difficult place to be in as funding would be cut for the deprecated teams. And ppl from there would be either laid off or re-assigned thus becoming a shell of what once was a big team.
I have been in the receiving end where my platform was not the "selected" choice going forward to be replaced by another "new platform". The funding was drastically cut.
We beat the odds and did a lot of deliverables, POCs with a lot of success and proved that we can meet the new platform goals admirably and beat it even. Also the new platform did not bring in the ROI and was found to be "Lost the forest for the trees" concept.
Only we proved what we could do we started to get continuous funding but still I have to justify any new hires....
gruffi - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
I don't think they are gone. Cat won't be continued. Which was foreseeable, IMHO. Because everything will be Zen from 2016 on. The engineers probably switched to others design teams, for example Zen/K12.krumme - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Contrarevenue vs Oil - Fight !BlueBlazer - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
From the leaks found especially at Geekbench database (e.g. http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/2113126 ), suggests that Carrizo-L is most likely rebranded Mullins/Beema APUs (had the same family, model and stepping) with slightly higher frequency. That 'Radeon' is most likely R2, like those found on E2-6110 and E1-6010.movax2 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Well, that's not bad.I think new Mullins are interesting too. Their performance was on par with fastest Atom Z3xxx family.
It should very good for tablets.
BlueBlazer - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
Except chips for fanless tablets are typically around 2W (like Intel's Bay Trail http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-... ), while Carrizo-L is 10W to 25W range. Large fanless tablets around 10 inch and larger can use 4.5W chips (like Intel's Broadwell-Y http://www.anandtech.com/show/9160/the-dell-venue-... ) but that's is still way below Carrizo-L's wattage. Furthermore its not faster than Bay Trail-T actually when compared to a quad core tablet SoC like Intel Atom Z3736F http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/... or compared to a dual core 4.3W SoC like Intel Atom N2807 http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/... Thus Carrizo-L will most probably will be destined for low cost laptops rather than tablets...gruffi - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
2W is SDP, not TDP. There are also Mullins APUs with 2W SDP. Don't mix SDP with TDP! That's completely misleading.