AMD’s Carrizo laptop processors to focus on power efficiency

AMD has revealed their new Carrizo range of processors that are heavily focused on extending the run time of performance-oriented laptops.

Efficiency is the main feature of the Carrizo chips, with the new core architecture named Excavator being 5 percent faster than it’s predecessor the Kaveri, but it purportedly takes 40% less juice at the same clock rate, with even the graphical core supposedly using 20 % less power.

The chip is also the first processor to meet the completed Heterogeneous System Architecture spec, which essentially lets the CPU and intergrated graphics share memory. This allows some tasks to finish faster than they normally would and is likely to give performance and battery life a much needed boost. The Carrizo chips will also feature dedicated H.265 video decoding which will aid in video streaming.

Overall the new processor looks quite promising, and Carrizo is expected to hit PCs by the second quarter of this year; close to Intel’s mid-year target for it’s quad-core Broadwell chips. If we’re lucky we’ll have both Intel and AMD chips hitting the market simultaneously.