First AMD Carrizo APU Performance Figures Exposed

AMD’s main APU platform is still the Kaveri, but that might not be the only APU to be on the market this year. The new Carrizo APUs are rumoured to make their debut in December, although it will only be the mobile version for now.

We’ve already seen some leaks and know that the Carrizo APU will be based on the next generation of Excavator CPU cores, while the graphic part stays with the GCN architecture. AMD made significant enhancements to the memory efficiency but stays with DDR3 type memory for now.

From previous leaks, we know that the new mobile processor will have 4 CPU cores with 2MB L2 cache at a 15W TDP. The GPU is still the third generation GCN architecture with 8 CU units each with 64 stream processors and 2RB raster units. So a total of 512 stream processors won’t change, but the memory efficiency has been improved. It will support the full HSA features as well as the new Direct X 12 specifications.

Now the first performance figures on the Carrizo APU have appeared in the Sisoftware database. While this is still an Engineering Sample and is named Gardenia Carrizo, it shows us 2 Modules with 4 cores and a frequency of 2.6GHz that is most likely the turbo frequency. The GPU core doesn’t have a name, but the code CARRIZO 9874 instead.

The tests by Sisoftware show a performance of 24.6 GFLOPS, a result that is far from a desktop processor, but right on par with the mobile Kaveri A10-7300 APU. That one however runs at 3.2 GHz where the new chip performs the same at 2.6GHz instead. So it’s basically a 20-30% efficiency increase compared to the predecessor in the same TDW package.

We see even better improvements when we get to the GPU part. Even though it doesn’t change much in the architecture, AMD has improved a lot upon it. With the memory optimizations and the 256MB of memory used as cache, the general purpose computing performance reaches 461.4MPixs/s compared to the 215.279MPix/s that the Kaveri performed. That’s almost the double, an impressive result from AMD.

Thanks to Expreview for providing us with this information

Images courtesy of Expreview