AMD has finally unveiled the Carrizo APU, the company's newest offering in next-generation mobile architecture and the final iteration of the Bulldozer microarchitecture first released in 2011.
Carrizo was formally announced at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. According to PC World, AMD is calling the Carrizo the sixth-generation in the company's A-series microprocessors. During the presentation, AMD's top executives said that the Carrizo will be targeting notebook computers, specifically those at the $400 to $700 segment which will represent around 38 percent of the expected notebook sales for 2015.
According to Extreme Tech, the Carrizo is the product of AMD's years of development in order to produce a mobile APU that offers the best performance per watt, lower thermal design point and improved battery life. AMD has yet to provide the exact date when the Carrizo will hit the market. Experts say that it should be between the end of June or within the first week of July.
AMD's mainstream product line manager Jason Banta said, "We think [the notebook] is a key device for 2015. We think it is a segment to get right, and we think our competition has gotten it wrong."
AMD is betting big for its Carrizo APU and is risking a lot in concentrating in the notebook market. However, experts agree that if Carrizo will deliver the performance AMD is promising then the company might have hit the jackpot this time around.
The secret to this, as AMD claims, is hardware optimization. Under Carrizo's hood is four Excavator CPU cores with eight graphic cores all soldered into a single piece of processor. AMD also added a dedicated hardware decoder for HEVC-encoded movies which will greatly extend a device's battery life.