AMD Releases New PRO Mobile APUs: Carrizo up to A12-8800B
by Ian Cutress on October 2, 2015 7:25 PM EST
We touched upon this very briefly in our recent HP Elitebook news, but at the end of September AMD officially launched four new professional mobile APUs under the AMD PRO line. The PRO line is similar to the commercial line of APUs that end up in the hands of casual users, except they are mostly sold in machines aimed at the professional market, and might have some slightly different arrangements in configuration to ensure a long-tail support program. This typically means that features such as TrustZone (using ARM IP) embedded in the processors go through ISV (independent software vendor) certification to ensure a fully functioning product.
The four AMD PRO processors being released today all use AMD’s latest microarchitecture codenamed Carrizo, which fits comprises of one or two ‘Excavator’ class modules and Radeon Rx graphics. In a change from regular AMD A-Series nomenclature, the top processor of the stack is now an ‘A12’ class design which reaches greater parity with previous microarchitecture designs on the desktop. This means a dual module design paired with eight graphics compute units giving what AMD calls 12 compute cores in total with ‘R7’ graphics.
AMD’s Carrizo platform was built focused on the 15W TDP window, although AMD will allow its partners to boost the designs with a configurable TDP up to 35W on the A12, A10 and A8. AMD is also promising an enterprise package with partners to ensure a 36-month extended OEM warranty, 24-month product longevity, 18-month image stability and a ‘richer configuration’ package. That last point is promoted through the use of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X5 LTE modem (Cat4) in certain HP branded professional notebook designs.
Carrizo’s raison d’être was to bring use cases that required high end laptop configurations down into the mainstream (>$800 into $500-$700), which could be considered important if a business is considering deployment of several hundred devices at once along with a support package to go along with it. The PRO APUs will also support DASH for remote desktop management as well as AMD PRO Control Center for SMBs.
AMD expects a number of partners to release information over the next few months. We are working towards obtaining a suitable Carrizo unit for testing as well.
Source: AMD
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Penti - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
FX-8800P/A12-8800B graphics.Penti - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link
Also not really 2/3 of the graphics performance at 15W. A notebook with a 28W Broadwell/Skylake with Iris graphics would beat it. Both graphics and CPU, 15W Intel chips would be better overall and in much better laptops.yannigr2 - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
At 720p with everything turned down at lowest settings, Skylake will probably win a few benchmarks because of the much better IPC from the CPU cores. Turn a few settings up and AMD APU will start winning benchmarks easily against Skylake iGPU. And I am not talking about 10fps vs 11fps scenarios, but more like 30fps for AMD and 15fps for Skylake.Penti - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
Iris (40 or 48 EU) will ship in a lot more machines than the unconstrained 8800 part and often at lower prices.Penti - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
Also not like you can find a 700 USD Ultrabook with a FX-8800P.Penti - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
Any GT3 part is essentially faster or as fast, from Haswell and forward. There's simply not the kind of difference your trying to imply, not even when you go down to GT2 parts. Considering that 8700P is a more likely part, anything playable on a Carrizo is playable on a ordinary Intel CPU. Anything playable on a FX-8800P is playable on a GT3 part. So what's the point? You can get great Intel machine from 500 dollar and up.silverblue - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
I mean that Carrizo's 15W performance would be 2/3 that of its 35W performance.And again, the Iris comparison is null and void purely because of the huge price difference. It's also worth bearing in mind that Broadwell on the desktop will have a faster IGP than that which goes into mobile products, purely because of the reduced power level.
Penti - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
Nah it's not because you get 28W Iris machines for 600 dollars. The AMD PRO machines start at 749 USD and most will ship without the 8800 part which will land at around 1000 USD. A 700 dollar FX-8800P machine at thermal and power constraints aren't really a good buy.Yes I also meant it's less than 2/3's of the graphics performance of the chip configured for 35W. Not against any other chip.
medi03 - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
At what price?meacupla - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
so how does it compare to an i5-6300HQ?