Tuesday, February 24th 2015
AMD's Excavator Core is Leaner, Faster, Greener
AMD gave us a technical preview of its next-generation "Carrizo" APU, which is perhaps the company's biggest design leap since "Trinity." Built on the 28 nm silicon fab process, this chip offers big energy-efficiency gains over the current-generation "Kaveri" silicon, thanks to some major under-the-hood changes.
The biggest of these is the "Excavator" CPU module. 23 percent smaller in area than "Steamroller," (same 28 nm process), Excavator features a new high-density library design, which reduces die-area of the module. Most components are compacted. The floating-point scheduler is 38% smaller, fused multiply-accumulate (FMAC) units compacted by 35%, and instruction-cache controller compacted by another 35%. The "Carrizo" silicon itself uses GPU-optimized high-density metal stack, which helps with the compaction. Each "Excavator" module features two x86-64 CPU cores, which are structured much in the same way as AMD's previous three CPU core generations.
The compaction in components doesn't necessarily translate into lower transistor-counts over "Kaveri." In fact, Carrizo features 3.1 billion transistors (Haswell-D has 1.4 billion). Other bare-metal energy optimizations include an 18% leakage reduction over previous generation, using faster RVT components, which enables 10% higher clock speeds at the same power-draw (as "Kaveri"). A new adaptive-voltage algorithm reduces CPU power draw by 19%, and iGPU power draw by 10%. AMD introduced a few new low-power states optimized for mobile devices such as >9-inch tablets and ultra-compact notebooks, which reduces overall package power draw to less than 1.5W when idling, and a little over 10W when active. In all, AMD is promising a conservative 5% IPC uplift for Excavator over Steamroller, but at a staggering 40% less power, and 23% less die-area.
The integrated-GPU is newer than the one featured on "Kaveri." It features 8 compute units (512 stream processors) based on Graphics CoreNext 1.3 architecture, with Mantle and DirectX 12 API support, and H.265 hardware-acceleration, with more than 3.5 times the video transcoding performance increase over "Kaveri." For notebook and tablet users, AMD is promising "double-digit percentage" improvements in battery life.
Now, if only AMD can put six of these leaner, faster, and greener "Excavator" modules onto an AM3+ chip.
The biggest of these is the "Excavator" CPU module. 23 percent smaller in area than "Steamroller," (same 28 nm process), Excavator features a new high-density library design, which reduces die-area of the module. Most components are compacted. The floating-point scheduler is 38% smaller, fused multiply-accumulate (FMAC) units compacted by 35%, and instruction-cache controller compacted by another 35%. The "Carrizo" silicon itself uses GPU-optimized high-density metal stack, which helps with the compaction. Each "Excavator" module features two x86-64 CPU cores, which are structured much in the same way as AMD's previous three CPU core generations.
Now, if only AMD can put six of these leaner, faster, and greener "Excavator" modules onto an AM3+ chip.
85 Comments on AMD's Excavator Core is Leaner, Faster, Greener
Anyone having a Core 3xxx doesn't have much reason to upgrade to Core 4xxx or 5xxx.
AMD is doing a very good job on their APU designs. Carrizo should make a lot of people very happy. AMD is scheduled to officially release these chippies in Q2 of '15. They are actually in production now.
For those not up top speed on die shrink sizes, there is almost zero performance gain now that we are below 32Nm. The biggest gains in die shrink are lower power and higher transistor density, which reduce CPU/APU costs. With AMD's advanced power management on Carrizo, power consumption is reduced even further than in prior low power APU models.
Carrizo APUs will be available in both mobile and desktop versions with mobile models being released first.
The fact that Intel hasn't improved much is down to market complacency and general optimisations being prioritised.
I'd love to see AMD release something even half as good as some of the latest Intel CPU's. Until these are released and in consumer hands I won't be making any judgements, as the last time they did this they released the original FX that ended up being a turd (although over it's lifetime it's improved somewhat...).
This is of course ignoring the price differences (which AMD has aced)!
Those recent launches from them for some reason didn't show anything than negligible improvements both in power consumption and performance, so I guess they don't even use the process nodes' full potential which is a shame.
I really need a new notebook badly; Web browsing, twitch streaming, Youtube and gaming are top priorities for me.
My current laptop gets so sluggish running flash packed websites and source quality videos on twitch.
It can't even run 1080p 60fps youtube videos, without crashing the browser and the extensions running on Chrome.
Hope these ones come in equipped with SSDs, unlike their predecessors Kaveri laptops.
With Zen AMD needs to go directly to DDR4 and forget about DDR3.
AM3+ is now dead. AMD should come up with a new socket when the new node is ready for mass high performance production, and they can deliver desktop/server CPUs with many cores with at least somewhat competitive performance. That may not be possible without the new node, so releasing a DOA desktop platform too soon would be a terrible mistake, putting the nail in the coffin.
The funny thing about all of this is that it's exactly how APUs work and how Intel CPUs work. AM3+ is just a dying platform because of the archaic design of having the PCI-E root complex on the motherboard (which is awesome for cheap servers I might add. It's half of the reason my gateway still has the Phenom II and a 790FX in it, PCI-E galore! I could add 8 ethernet ports and still have PCI-E to spare.)
Now, if only I could BUY a laptop with an AMD APU in these parts, that'd be great.
Me and quite a few people from around here I know are looking for [decent] laptops with AMD APUs. But it's Intels as far as the eye can see.
"There's a demand. But zero supply for the last few years."
ARG.
16 nm node doesn't have transistors that are 2 times smaller than at 32 nm node. FinFET Transistors at 16 nm node just have thinner fins so marketing comes to play and starts measuring the fin width and BAM new silicon node is here ... where in fact there's nothing new except tapered fins.
Main optimizations these days come from figuring out how to arrange the transistors in order for them to be able to share a fin or two.