AMD Restructuring
At a press event in Singapore Thursday AMD (NYSE: AMD) announced Carrizo and Carrizo-L, the followups to Kaveri.
Carrizo will ship with an Excavator class CPU paired with a Radeon GPU and will be fabbed on the 28nm process node. It’s mobile-focused counterpart, Carrizo-L, will package four Puma+ CPU cores together with AMD R-Series GCN chips onto an SoC. Carrizo and Carrizo-L will also integrate an AMD Secure Processor enabling ARM TrustZone technology. AMD also says that the Carrizo platform will be fully HSA 1.0 compliant, whereas its predecessor Kaveri only had ‘HSA Features’.
Carrizo will support DirectX 12, OpenCL 2.0, Mantle and Freesync according to AMD.
Whether these chips will support DDR4 is unknown at this time.
AMD is mum on exactly what the graphics architecture on the chip is, but in a promotional video on YouTube hyping the chip AMD’s John Byrne, the company’s Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer, said that the architecture would be “brand new”. Byrne also said that AMD is testing the silicon right now, which is possible because the company used the tried-and-true 28nm process versus a new and untested process node.
AMD has yet to announce any hardware wins for the chips, although Byrne said, “Very soon, you’ll see a whole array of platforms for the consumer and commercial space.”
More details will likely be available during January’s CES. AMD is targeting for the platform to be released in the first half of 2015.
