At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2015) in San Francisco, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) unveiled the first architectural details of its Carrizo APU and Excavator core.

The APU, intended for laptops and low-power desktops, is expected to have a formal launch in China this spring but at ISSCC 2015 attendees got a first glimpse at the new silicon.

“As a part of our continued focus on building great products, the advanced power and performance optimizations we have designed into our upcoming ‘Carrizo’ APU will deliver the largest generational performance-per-watt gain ever for a mainstream AMD APU,” Sam Naffziger, AMD Corporate Fellow and co-author of the ISSCC presentation, said in a press release.

Carrizo’s Excavator core is based on the 28nm process, but AMD says that it’s able to squeeze in 29% more transistors on the same die size thanks to something AMD is calling high design libraries. Carrizo has 3.1 billion transistors compared to Haswell-D’s 1.4 billion.

AMD is not yet disclosing the number of Excavator CPU cores in each Carrizo chip. However the company did say that each chip will have eight Radeon GCN cores. AMD also says that Excavator will have a 5% gain in instructions per cycle over Steamroller. Compared to chips with the Steamroller architecture Excavator will have 23% less die area and will consume 40% less power.

Carrizo will also support on-chip H.265 video decode.

As expected, Carrizo chips will support native Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) as well as heterogeneous Unified Memory Access (hUMA), which gives the CPU and GPU portions of the SoC the same memory space.

More details on Carrizo will be available this spring, as AMD executives have said before that they intend to do a formal launch of the chip sometime between March to May in China.

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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.

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In a bid to secure more market share in the desktop segment, AMD (NYSE:AMD) is slashing prices of its Kaveri A-class APU by as much as 20% across the board. In order to sweeten the deal, AMD is also throwing in a free game to users purchasing the discounted CPUs.

Customers purchasing the A10-7850K, A10-7800, A10-7700K, A10-6800K or A10-6790K will be able to choose from Sniper Elite 3, Murdered: Soul Suspect or Thief, with the promotion valid until the end of October. AMD is also throwing in Corel Aftershot Pro 2 for $5, which is a discount of over $60 off the retail price of the software.

The price cut is not limited to the A-series processors, as the older Richland CPUs are also seeing a discount, with the A10-6800K now available for just $112. Other processors in the Richland series that have received a discount include the A8-6600K, which now retails for $92, the A4-6300, which is now at $34, as well as the A4-5300 and A4-4000, which cost $31 and $27 respectively.

Here’s how much the Kaveri-series APUs cost after the discount:

The discounted pricing is just the latest in a series of moves the silicon vendor has undertaken of late, which also includes strengthening its partnership with hardware vendor Asus (TPE:2357). If the rumors are to be believed, AMD is not only offering Asus a heavy discount on processors, but is also collaborating closely with the vendor on the upcoming Zen APU platform.

With the vendor facing an uphill battle with Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) on the CPU side of things and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) on the GPU front, it remains to be seen whether the latest round of discounts have any effect on its market share.

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A10 7800, a new locked FM2+ APU. This new APU from AMD has 12 compute cores split between 4 CPU and 8 GPU. The Kaveri cores are clocked at 3.5GHz it can go up to a 3.9GHz with Turbo, and the GPU clock speed is 720MHz. The APU has a TDP of 65W making this a great choice for those wanting to build an energy efficient build. These would be well suited to a HTPC or entry level build. Today the 7800 will be put through its paces and see how it performs.

AMD A10 7800 APU – Bottom

Test System

• AMD A10 7800
• MSI A88X G45-GAMING
• Team Vulcan DDR3 2400 2x8GB
• Mushkin Chronos 240GB
• Silverstone Strider 1KW PSU
• Cooler Master TPC 812 cooler
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

The 7800 is a locked chip which makes this a good choice for those who are not looking to overclock the big brother; the 7850K as it will save some money and be close in performance. The GPU is overclockable which is nice since you can easily make it run over 1000MHz, thus gaining a lot of performance. The 7800 accommodates up to 2133MHz DDR3 and is capable of going over that when you overclock.

PCMARK 8

AIDA64 – Memory Benchmark

The performance is very good for something that is low power and an in an entry to mid-level tier. Playing Borderlands 2 at 1080p with great frame rates was a nice surprise, though it did take a bit of settings optimization. Media playback was very smooth when playing media files with multiple filters that leveraged the GPUs. One of the best uses of the 7800 is definitely going to be as a HTPC where heavy graphics load isn’t going to be used. It would be well suited to playing not as demanding games on the tv if used in that way.

3DMARK Benchmarks

Overclocking the 7800 was easily done by driving up the bus speed to 106 from 100; this also increased the RAM speed to 2260. The 106 bus speed was the max stable speed that was found, though 107.5 was achievable but was very unstable. This chip will overclock even better when put under sub-zero temps. On hwbot.org a speed of 4154MHz (119.45 bus speed) was achieved by Delly using a single stage phase change cooler on the same motherboard model. The GPU was easily pushed to 1018MHz with a little bump in GPU voltage.

Would I buy it?

This would definitely be on my personal shopping list for the heart of a HTPC build. The processor has a TDP 65W which is lower than that of the 7850K at 95W which is nice when you are looking to build a low wattage system. The price is also a nice factor since at $161,and being an APU you won’t need to spend extra money to play some of the latest games with acceptable frame-rates. If you are looking to tweak the system the 7850K would be the one to buy as it is unlocked at only a $8 premium. If not worried about things like power draw, then I would strongly recommend the 7850K as it will be easy to achieve overclocks of 4.5GHz for a great gain in performance.

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This year at Computex 2014, AMD had a lot to show consumers including their new Kaveri mobile chip, FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop running Battlefield 4 in 4K. Those three things were without a doubt AMD’s biggest announcements this week at Computex and we’ve got you covered with all the information about them, including videos and photos to simplify the explanation. We’ll be following up this article with another talking about Kaveri mobile, so most of the focus here will be on FreeSync and the Toshiba 4K laptop playing Battlefield 4.

At the beginning of Computex, AMD had a press conference where they talked about FreeSync and Kaveri mobile, and they had a demo of FreeSync running on one PC with the feature turned on and off. What they didn’t tell us was that at their booth on the Nangang convention center, they actually had FreeSync running side by side. So, when we found out about it we ran down to Nangang and got a video of the whole thing running side by side. Thanks to our Sony a6000 camera, we were able to easily capture the difference side by side and you can see the stuttering for yourself in the video.

Please remember that FreeSync is AMD’s similar implementation of what Nvidia did with G-Sync by combining the Adaptive Sync capabilities of eDP (embedded DisplayPort) in monitors. And by getting VESA to allow for it to translate over DisplayPort 1.2, creating Adaptive-Sync for DisplayPort and creating a DisplayPort 1.2a standard that would enable the translation of Adaptive-Sync from GPU to monitor. This full solution is dubbed by AMD as FreeSync since it should theoretically not cost consumers any more money as most features of FreeSync can be accomplished via firmware update. However, not many monitors use eDP so many consumers would end up having to get new monitors in order to be able to use FreeSync.

During AMD’s press conference they also had a Toshiba 4K laptop (the first 4K laptop in the world) running Battlefield 4. This laptop looked very unassuming in terms of physical attributes, but the 4K screen on the Toshiba laptop looked absolutely amazing. Sure, the frame rate was fairly low, but that means you could probably expect to play less intensive games in 4K on this Toshiba 4K laptop without a problem in the world.

We even included a video of this Toshiba 4K laptop so that you could see it for yourself since we had originally talked about it from its original announcement, but very few have had actually gotten their hands on it. The laptop itself runs very smoothly and is a great piece of kit, it will be interesting to see how much having a 4K panel affects battery life and how much more power the GPU consumes constantly displaying at 4K.

We’ll have more Computex coverage for you as we get to uploading more of our videos from the show.

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