AMD is debuting its high-performance Carrizo and Carrizo-L system-on-a-chip design at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and we're the first to offer pictures of the prototype.
While Carrizo-equipped systems won't be available until the mid-year time frame, the company has working silicon in hand.
AMD has thin and light prototype systems jointly developed with Shuttle Inc. and is showing them off at CES. According to Kevin Lensing, Senior Director, Product Management, AMD, "It's a 'Carrizo'-based system sporting an upcoming mobile discrete GPU and it delivers exceptional, unprecedented gaming performance in a thinner and lighter platform than previously possible due to the energy efficiency and performance focus we have in 'Carrizo.'" The CES demonstrations are limited to private appointments and aren't available to the general public, but Tom's Hardware will be there and we look forward to seeing what Carrizo can do.
Tom's also touts the company's new unified platform strategy: "Our scalable approach, which hasn't been used in the PC industry for many years now, addresses the complete stack from top to bottom with a single platform, meaning that our OEM partners will be able to use "Carrizo" and "Carrizo-L" to serve a wide range of the market – spanning form factors and price points from all-in-ones and mainstream notebooks, to ultra-thin and light performance and gaming notebooks – without needing to design, develop, and validate multiple platforms."
Carrizo checks a lot of boxes: a unified SoC platform that the company claims can scale from mainstream to enthusiast class performance, the new Excavator CPU core, the GCN graphics architecture, Mantle and DirectX 12 API support, Project FreeSync support, Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) 1.0, and an integrated ARM TrustZone processor on die.
Despite the impressive feature list, it may come down to plain-and-simple ability. Is Carrizo capable of generating playable frame rates in games while using an acceptably low amount of battery power? AMD claims that "…'Carrizo' delivers HD and Ultra HD graphics horsepower, increased compute performance and next-generation mobile gaming," and our discussions with representatives lead us to believe that the company considers this an important aspect of Carrizo's arsenal. We've also been told that technology research firm Gartner has indicated that thin and light notebook gaming is on the rise.
We're inclined to agree. If Carrizo has the chops to handle PC games in HD while maintaining modern power-efficiency expectations, it would open a new market up to AMD. Imagine a capable, reasonably-priced gaming notebook equipped with a built-in FreeSync monitor. But AMD has had capable on-die graphics chipsets for some time now. The question is, can it get power usage under control?
John Byrne, AMD's president and general manager of the company's computing and graphics business unit, has gone on the record saying that "…we're bringing a brand new graphics architecture integrated into Carrizo. This will be our biggest leap ever from an energy efficiency perspective." We're not sure how the company has tweaked GCN in order to achieve this purported leap in energy savings, but we've recently noted that AMD Appears To Have Power-Saving 'Dynamic Frame Rate Control' Feature Incoming. Maybe this has something to do with AMD's claims, maybe not, or maybe it's just one piece of the puzzle. Either way, we can't wait to get our hands on a Carrizo for testing later in 2015. In the immediate future, stay tuned for our impressions of our hands-on time with the Carrizo prototype system, coming very soon.
AMD has plenty of other issues going on, they are fighting 14nm with 28nm, and Carrizo is a placeholder before the next gen is ready. I don't expect it to be a big success. But I still think sharing a socket was a smart move.
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