AMD latest notebook APU double boosts for laptop battery life
AMD’s latest high-performance notebook APU: Carrizo: Huge Performance Boosts For Laptop’s Battery Life And Computing Power.
AMD calls Carrizo its “most versatile notebook processor ever”, the under-the-hood improvements are genuinely amazing. Say hello to double the battery life of last year’s laptops, as well as almost double the computing power.
The raw numbers that AMD is claiming are incredible for a single-generation change in processing. Eight and a half hours of video playback for a Carrizo laptop versus three and a half for a previous-gen one. Almost twice the performance in the same programs, while simultaneously reducing power consumption by half — a performance per Watt improvement of 2.4x versus AMD’s last-gen APUs. All of this while still on the same 28-nanometre production process as the last generation of chips, too.
Carrizo is aimed at everyday laptops — the $399, $799, $999 laptops you’ll see on the shelves of stores. The Dell Inspiron 1545 and Lenovo Thinkpad T430 of the world, not massive hulking powerhouses from Alienware and AORUS. It’s not a super-performance part like Intel’s newest Broadwell Core i7s, and it won’t beat them in outright CPU-compute performance. Nor is it a super-low-power tablet-esque like the energy-sipping Core M. Instead, Carrizo sits comfortably in between, consuming a little more power than Core M but besting Core i7 notebooks when it comes to the fun stuff, like gaming and video playback.
The improvements under the hood of Carrizo extend much further than baseline computing and graphics performance improvements. The latest low-power sleep modes are supported. A hardware h.264/h.265 HEVC video decoder is built in, much more efficiently playing video than by just using the CPU. Power improvements to the onboard memory cache, Toshiba PA3593U-1BAS laptop battery power improvements for the graphics voltage controller, power improvements to video game streaming and Skype calls in the next version of Windows.
Windows 10 itself comes with myriad improvements in the way notebooks and desktop PCs can operate — for both productivity and less-productive tasks like gaming. DirectX 12 is a huge part of that, and Carrizo is AMD’s first APU to support DirectX 12 instructions; as a result you’ll see a performance boost of about seven times versus the last-gen part under the same test. It’s also the first notebook to support HSA 1.0, the worldwide developer spec that aims to make it a lot easier to program software to run simultaneously across both CPU and GPU.
What’s best about Carrizo, in a way, is that it’s not a world-beating piece of hardware. It’s not the most powerful CPU out there or the most powerful GPU out there, because that’s a race that has already been run and that runs over and over and over. Carrizo makes huge, measurable, noticeable, importantimprovements in the middle of the market, in laptops that real people actually buy. We genuinely can’t wait until they start appearing in notebooks on store shelves and superseding the last generation — with HP 468816-001 battery and performance figures that just look embarrassing in hindsight.
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[…] AMD’s latest high-performance notebook APU: Carrizo: Huge Performance Boosts For Laptop’s Battery Life And Computing Power. AMD calls Carrizo its “most versatile notebook processor ever”, the under-the-hood improvements are genuinely amazing. Say hello to double the battery life of last year’s laptops, as well as almost double the computing power. The raw numbers that AMD … […]