AMD has officially unveiled its 6th generation of AMD A-Series processors, revealing the new laptop chips will provide double the battery life of its predecessor.
Previously codenamed “Carrizo” AMD claims the new processors will also have up to twice the graphics processing power of Intel’s rival chips.
Destined for laptops in the $400-$700 region, as well as all-in-one type devices, Carrizo is an integrated APU designed with both CPU and GPU on the same chip.
Moreover, AMD is calling it the world’s first high-performance APU in a System-on-Chip (SoC) design. This is due to the inclusion of other features such as a dedicated HEVC h.265 video decoder, as well as the central CPU and GPU features.
HEVC is the next generation of video compression that is being used for a lot of 4k video content, particularly for streaming applications. With a dedicated processor onboard, performance should be smooth while power consumption should be kept low.
The new A-Series processors will also include AMD’s FreeSync technology for syncing monitor refresh rate with graphics card output, for smooth gaming performance without tearing or stutter.
Gaming systems will also be able to combine a Carrizo APU with an extra graphics card for even better performance.
Carrizo uses up to four of the company’s latest Excavator CPU cores and up to eight of its third-generation Graphic Core Next (GCN) cores.
Excavator provides 15% greater performance over previous AMD CPU chips while consuming 40% less power and taking up 23% less space. Meanwhile the new graphic cores can deliver up to 65% more performance.
Previous generation AMD chips have struggled to break out of the value sector due to battery life simply not being competitive with Intel’s offerings, despite often having better graphics performance – gamers tend to buy laptops with separate dedicate graphics card instead.
With a doubling of battery life in this generation we could finally see AMD able to break out into a greater variety of products.
AMD showcased a range of new devices that use the new 6th generation A-Series chips. Most of these were of the 15in-17in laptop variety as well as slim all-in-one machines.
Carrizo products will be available imminently, with some notebooks arriving in June 2015.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.