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
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
53 Comments
View All Comments
Wolfpup - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link
What does the 8 GPU cores translate to in the way that's normally written? (Even if 8 is probably a more sane way of writing it...)The Xbox One's GPU has 12? (18 on the PS4?) I assume these are all GCN, so we're talking 600ish "cores" the old way, plus 2 of their newest CPU cores?
That doesn't sound bad for an all in one chip for a mid priced notebook. Hopefully they're sold to "normal" users too.
Penti - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link
512 stream processors, underclocked. That means less power than a R7 250 and less power than an Intel chip with integrated GT3/e graphics.The more popular 8700 models uses 384 stream processors, underclocked. A GT2 part basically matches that so there's simply no way to point to AMD graphics as a real selling argument here. Core M would make a better laptop and is found in better laptops.
danwat1234 - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
I hope AMD's 6th gen APUs or whatever, coming out soon for laptops will have some 35w TDP and 47w TDp chips! They need to clock higher in order to compete with Intel's mobile chips at all with X86 (CPU) performance. But, I'm guessing AMD will not do more than 35w, will hardly boost more than 3GHZ, won't beat a low end Skylake i3.