AMD Announce Carrizo Notebook APU

Earlier this week, we were invited to participate in a conference call with AMD. In the last few weeks, AMD has enticed into strict deadline shrouded calls that promised to show off the new technologies ready for the upcoming Summer show season; namely Computex and E3. As we already know, AMD are hosting a dedicated event at E3 to potentially unveil the new Radeon 300 series graphics cards, but what about the upcoming Godavari/ Kaveri Refresh and Carrizo APU’s?

Last week we took a call regarding the Godavari/ Kaveri Refresh APU series, being headed by the flagship A10-7870k. On Monday, we took a call regarding Carrizo APU line-up. Godavari is aimed for the desktop enthusiast market, where Carrizo will be notebook orientated. The notebook sector has a huge potential consumer base of around 63 million, with around 2/5’s of those consumers generally aiming to spend between $400-$700. The 6th generation (Carrizo) will be aimed to tackle new trends set by our current media requirements. Consumers have the pre-conception that desktops are the central hub of the home and the media services, however, in a recent survey it was found that notebooks were the second-largest platform for media-streaming with TV’s being first and tablets being third.

The 6th generation APU’s offers what most consumers are looking to achieve with a notebook.

The Carrizo processors feature a completely redesigned architecture to optimise power efficiency and provide more performance. This means that during gaming in huge titles such as DOTA2, League of Legends, etc.. you can see an increase in performance compared to the 5th generation APU’s and also have longer playing time.

Some key features that really interested me were the HEVC/ H.265 hardware decode, HSA 1.0 and hand gestures. Even though hand gestures have been featured on notebooks before, never have they been implemented at this price point. HSA 1.0 helps with AMDs Looking Glass, this feature scans through all discoverable pictures and videos and uses facial recognition to sort them into categories.