AMD just announced that the 6th Generation A Series APUs, codenamed “Carrizo”, is slated to arrive anytime soon, and the company is pretty confident that it will deliver what it is intended to do with a 2x better battery life over its predecessor & 2x better gaming performance compared to the offering of the competition – all in a SoC package made specifically for notebooks & AiO systems.
We previewed Carrizo in the past, specifically last year and this year’s earlier months discussing what would this 28nm chip will offer. Earlier on, AMD noted that Carrizo will feature a 40% better overall energy efficiency, Adaptive Voltage & Frequency Scaling (AVFS) technology which will enable up to 30% power efficiency, and will offer a dedicated power delivery route for its APU’s GPU Cores so we are most likely going to see the 2x battery performance claims.
All in all, power efficiency claims were good, but what about performance? Well, since it’s a full HSA 1.0 compliant APU, but performance has not yet been fully revealed thus far, all we can do is speculate especially if the 40% extra performance claims were taken from an Intel iGPU system which is most likely the least kind of system you would want if you’re going to a budget mobile gaming system.
We have a 3DMark 2013 benchmark though (Taken from WCCFTech) using the top-end FX-8800P SoC APU, configured with an unknown Radeon R7 M300 graphics with 1GB frame buffer. The rest of the benchmark’s details are posted on this 3DMark result: https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/9453670.
On a side note, we are hoping that the latest AMD APUs will see leverage when Windows 10 & DirectX 12 comes.
