t’s
a big summer for AMD. New
graphics cards are right around the corner, and DirectX
12’s ability to leverage discrete and integrated
GPUs seeminly has the potential to breathe new life into AMD’s processors,
which have long struggled against Intel in CPU performance. A couple weeks
before Computex, AMD held a small briefing in San Francisco to talk about some
of its less flashy hardware improvements coming this year in the form of
Carrizo, its 6th gen notebook processor, which is launching today.
Carrizo
isn’t as exciting as new graphics cards, and it’s not a powerful chip for
gaming. It’s aimed at cheap mid-range $400 - $700 notebooks, which no one buys
with gaming as a priority. But AMD’s trying to make the case that Carrizo’s
graphics core has enough power to play the games that count for the mainstream.
And you can probably guess what those games are: League of Legends, Dota 2,
Minecraft, CS:GO.
AMD
claims Carrizo delivers twice the graphics performance of Intel’s integrated i7
graphics. For a concrete example, Carrizo delivers about 48 fps in League of
Legends at 1080p, settings maxed. That’s shy of the smooth 60 fps any serious
player would want, but close enough for a solid 60 to be achievable with a few
tweaks. More importantly, Carrizo’s far more power efficient than before,
delivering about 9 hours of 1080p H.264 playback and double the battery life of
the previous gen.
It’s
the first mainstream notebook chip to have a built-in HEVC (H.265) hardware
decoder, which is great for playing video, but not especially relevant to
gaming. But that’s AMD’s whole pitch with Carrizo—they claim people buy
mainstream $400-$700 notebooks expecting them to do a little bit of everything,
and there are certainly plenty of low-spec games out there that will run fine
on a Carrizo laptop.
The
bigger story with the new APU is really how much AMD did with so little.
Despite still being on a 28nm process, AMD’s engineers managed to improve the
density of the CPU by about 38% after being inspired by the efficiency of the
GPU core. That shrinkage increased power efficiency, leading to less thermal
leakage, which allowed them to run the voltage and clock speed of the CPU
higher without any new architectural improvements.
The
GPU’s seen performance improvements as well, but Carrizo still isn’t going to
be a APU anyone turns to for a dedicated gaming system. It can beat out very
low-end dedicated graphics and Intel’s integrated chips, but not a decent
dedicated mobile GPU. Still, it’s an impressive engineering feat. If AMD can
squeeze this much energy efficiency and performance out of a dated platform, we
can hopefully expect something equally impressive from next
year’s desktop Zen processor.
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