AMD details Carrizo mobile APU chips coming in 2015

Chip firm promises greater performance with new Excavator CPU core

AMD has announced new mobile processors designed to offer greater performance for laptops and all-in-one desktop systems aimed at the commercial and consumer markets.

The new family of AMD's accelerated processor units (APUs), codenamed Carrizo, are scheduled to ship in the first half of 2015 and are intended to deliver a significant leap in performance and energy efficiency, the firm said.

"Carrizo will be our APU that's targeting right at the heart of performance mobile and all-in-one for 2015," said John Byrne, senior vice president and general manager for AMD's Computing and Graphics business group.

The family initially comprises the Carrizo processor, which is based on a new x86 CPU core from AMD codenamed Excavator, along with a lower cost product called Carrizo-L, which is based on an enhanced version of the Puma CPU core seen in the Beema and Mullins chips earlier this year.

Like those chips, Carrizo and Carrizo-L are likely to ship in quad-core and dual-core versions, and are expected to include support for DDR3 and DDR4 memory technologies.

Both are system-on-a-chip designs and, like AMD's other APUs, integrate on-chip GPU functions as well as the CPU cores. For Carrizo, this will be next-generation AMD Radeon graphics, while Carrizo-L will be comparable with AMD Radeon R-Series GPUs.

As with Beema and Mullins, Carrizo and Carrizo-L integrate an AMD Secure Processor enabling ARM TrustZone technology, which is intended to offer enhanced security for commercial customers as well as consumers.

"Very soon, you'll see a whole array of platforms for both the consumer and commercial space," Byrne said.

Carrizo and Carrizo-L will also be available in the same chip package, enabling system vendors to build systems that can ship wth either processor, according to AMD.