AMD Announces 6th Generation A-Series APU Branding using Carrizo,Due This Quarter

Along with AMD’s roadmap announcements today at financial analyst day, AMD has also offered a brief update on the state of Carrizo, the company’s forthcoming next-generation mobile APU. Due for launch this year, AMD has just confirmed that Carrizo is ramping well and will be launching this quarter, though SKU details are not being provided at this time.



Meanwhile, AMD is also using the opportunity to announce their intended branding for Carrizo notebooks. These products will now be known as the 6th generation A-series, and will be featuring revised AMD badges to indicate this. AMD will be retaining the current FX/A10/A8 branding, with the only real change being the inclusion of the “6th generation” branding on the badges.



Badging aside, AMD still will have to face the fact that they’re launching a 28nm notebook APU versus Intel’s 14nm notebook CPUs, the company is once again banking on their strong GPU performance to help drive sales. Coupled with the combination of low power optimizations in Carrizo and full fixed-function hardware decoding of HEVC, and AMD will be relying on Carrizo to carry them through to 2016 and Zen.



Finally, though it will come a bit later in the year, AMD’s FAD update has also briefly mentioned their plans for their AMD Pro lineup and how Carrizo will impact it. In short, AMD will be leaning on a combination of Carrizo’s power gains, and their own security technology as found in the Pro APUs.

Model numbers for "Noble" Note 5 and "Zen" Galaxy S6 uncovered

Two Samsung IMEI numbers have surfaced that point to two new Galaxy models. Their model numbers are SM-G928S and SM-N920F and the rumor mill has decoded them as the "Zen" Galaxy S6 Plus and "Noble" Galaxy Note 5 respectively.

The SM-G928 appears to be a variation on the Galaxy S6 (G920), but it's unclear what will change from the current model. The final letters reveal regional versions, F for Europe, A and V for AT&T and Verizon, S and K for SK Telecom and KT.

The SM-N920F we couldn’t find and its name does coincide with what the next Note should be – the Galaxy Note 4 is the N910. Unfortunately that doesn’t give us much, neither does the "Noble" codename.

The letters indicate a European version, plus one for each carrier except KT.

AMD Zen core leaked: Successor to Excavator core

High performance monster

The block diagram of the new AMD Zen core has found its way onto the Planet 3 news group.

If the leak is accurate it compares the Zen, on the right, with AMD's upcoming and last Clustered Multithreading / CMT CPU core code named Excavator.
Excavator is the last of AMD's Bulldozer family of cores and it will appear with AMD's Carrizo APU, which AMD claims will be the most power efficient mainstream APU.

Zen takes a more traditional AMD CPU layout similar to Phenom. There appears to be one integer cluster in a Zen core while there are two as in the Excavator. Bulldozer had a high integer throughput at the expense of floating point performance.

In Zen AMD uses a single fetch and single decode unit on the front end which is also a step back from Steamroller's double decoders that were introduced with.

It appears then that Zen will have a higher single threaded integer and floating point performance compared to Excavator and Bulldozer.

AMD has introduced a floating point that's twice as wide as that of Excavator. Featuring two FMAC 256-bit units. These will probably fuse and process 512-bit AVX floating point instructions. In Bulldozer this is carried out by two 128-bit FMAC units. They can process one 128-bit SIMD instruction each per clock or fuse to process a single 256-bit AVX instruction per cycle. So it looks like Zen's FPU will go the same way and allow both FMACs to cooperate and process 512bit AVX instructions.

Zen enables 512bit AVX support, and with the wider floating point unit can process less complex instructions at double the rate of Excavator. Historically AMD did well with floating point performance until Bulldozer so this will be a return to form.
Zen features a 50 per cent wider integer pipeline vs a single Excavator core. Which will also dramatically improve the single threaded / per core performance of Zen.

Coupled with a more advanced 14nm process from Samsung/Globalfoundries the net result should be a significantly faster, leaner, smaller and more power efficient CPU core than Excavator.

We are expecting to see the products in the shops next year with more official information coming out in a couple of weeks.