Gallery: AMD's new high-performance, energy-efficient 'Carrizo' APU

AMD's next-generation A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) for laptops and low-power desktops, codenamed "Carrizo", will simultaneously ramp up energy efficiency and boost performance.

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor Feb. 25, 2015 at 2:28 a.m. PT

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AMD “Carrizo”

"Carrizo" will be an x86 APU built using 28-nanometer architecture and will, according to AMD, be optimized for both power and area efficiency. It is expected to make an appearance inside notebooks and all-in-one PCs towards mid-year, but AMD has unveiled some details about the new chip at International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).

29 percent more transistors in nearly the same die size as its predecessor, the "Kaveri"
New "Excavator" x86 cores provide an uplift in instructions-per-clock at 40 percent less power
New Radeon GPU cores with dedicated power supply
Dedicated, on-chip H.265 video decode
Double digit percentage increases in both performance and battery life
Integrated Southbridge for the first time on an AMD high-performance APU