AMD Carrizo APU presentation leaked

#5018304 Posted on: 02/23/2015 12:16 AM

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a10-7850k ~ 2.41B of transistors. This slide shows 3.1B? (it probably means that excavator has still around 2.4B of transistors, but is considerably smaller)
With this there are still 4 CPU cores + 8 GCN cores? should have been up to 12 GCN cores, ti would be big win.

But 2nd slide is very interesting... (Sadly interesting)
- Excavator can go down to 2.5W.
- if we take 20W Steamroller, it will have same clock speed as 20W Excavator
- below 20W Excavator can run at higher frequency than Steamroller, above 20W Excavator is actually worse

In contrast to that 1st image claims 40% power consumption reduction and 5% higher IPC. Imagine Steamroller 65W APU, which are great 65W * 0.6 = 39W, that would not look bad, but 2nd picture actually says that it will not happen.
I think Excavator can have 45W APU with performance of Steamroller 65W. Question is what TDP will be highest available to notebooks. I would love to have just 45W APU with user configurable TDP from like 5W to 45W.

Then again next thing 2nd image shows:
- to get from 20W to 5W Steamroller had to drop 45% of its frequency
- to get from 20W to 5W Excavator has to drop only 33% of its frequency

And I think that 2nd image is wrongly made, as not in single part of this normalized graph Excavator exhibits 40% lower power consumption while running same clocks as Steamroller.

None the less, if Excavator is 29% smaller, it is cheaper to make too. It may just stand a chance in notebooks against intel as price can be good, and one can only hope that power consumption is as low as numbers show, because that graph is just sad.

#5018319 Posted on: 02/23/2015 12:48 AM

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Not to mess with my #2 post here are some more and this time positive things:
2nd slide shows normalized clock/power consumption for CORE PAIR which I kind of overlooked.
In other words it is just figure for 1 Excavator module, not for entire APU. They made quite messy slides.

It therefore says that CPU cores itself (likely without caches and other stuff around) are equal at 10W per core, or 20W per module. Therefore 2 modules (4 cores) of Excavator would at 40W have same clock speed as Steamroller.
Below that wattage there will be improvement of some kind.
It means that in 35W or even 45W APU there is power saving for sure. And it is economically smart to make them.
And since power figures were per module, 4 modules will be like 5W + 7W GPU & other stuff, so lowest 4+8 Carrizo may go somewhere around this.

#5018458 Posted on: 02/23/2015 10:45 AM

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Superb APU for laptops and netbooks

Sadly Intel wont allow this APU's presence in the mobile world All the best to see this chip in real machine

#5018471 Posted on: 02/23/2015 11:18 AM

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It will be attractive for note/netbook makers, AMD earlier promised that they'll deliver whole platform (including boards design).
And since Carrizo is full SoC including southbridge, board design is to be easy. Manufacturing costs should be low, and It can be very small PCB. Allowing to integrate bigger batteries.

BTW, i have seen rest of slides:
- S0i3 power state should be entered in less than 1 second on the fly and APU will be reduced to around 50mW
- Slide here with power savings is just comparison of High performance vs High Density library, there are other slides showing additional power savings from AVFS modules altering frequency based on Voltage fluctuation instead of keeping stable clock at expense of burning extra energy if Voltage drops
- And as before, slides are mess at some places, like stating there are 10 AVFS and image next to it shows 11
- And as before, once GPU is under heavy load CPU part gets sacrificed, but in total I think there will be quite positive difference in performance at same TDP

(I was waiting for FX-7600p without dGPU for quite some time, it never came. Maybe this time around some manufacturer delivers 35/45W 4C+8G piece.)

What sales would have 12/13.3" notebook without Optical drive but additional battery? APU part itself + cooling + 1x HDD + 2x m.2 sata would take so small place that 50~60% of space could be battery.

#5018601 Posted on: 02/23/2015 05:10 PM

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Yeah, screw Intel. They're dominating with their low-power high-performance solutions. How can they possibly dare to do that?

/s

Are you seriously blaming Intel for AMD's ridiculous inability to compete? AMD's power consumption is off the charts. If this Carrizo thing is as good as they say, they may have a chance to gain marketshare.
But I simply fear that it's going to be another disappointment and I will still buy high-priced Intel hardware.