AMD Carrizo APU Will Not Come To Desktop Socketed Platforms – Will Stick To Mobility Platforms

Yesterday, we reported how AMD demonstrated a working prototype laptop based on their upcoming Carrizo APU. AMD’s Carrizo APU which is the next in line of AMD’s fusion roadmap and the most incremental step in delivering a true system-on-chip APU design will be coming in two variants, a low power variant which will be featuring the PUMA+ cores and a performance variant which will feature the Excavator core. While launch of both chips is planned in mid of 2015, it seems like the socketed platforms won’t get a taste of the new Carrizo APUs.

AMD Skipping Carrizo APU On Socketed Desktop Platforms

The report that AMD will be skipping Carrizo APU from socketed platforms comes from TechReport to whom, AMD shared details on both Carrizo and Carrizo-L APUs while also saying that the company has no plans to offer Carrizo as a socketed chip for desktop PCs. You can read the note for yourself before we move on with this report:

AMD shared some new details about its upcoming Carrizo and Carrizo-L APUs at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Among the new info: AMD has no plans to offer Carrizo as a socketed chip for desktop PCs. via TechReport

Now this is surprising since it was not only two years that Intel had plans to ditch their socketed LGA platforms in favor of BGA platforms and at that time, AMD made it clear that they were committed to prepare socketed CPUs for consumers and enthusiasts in the long run. Intel was also soon to react towards the news and said that they were also committed to socketed CPUs for “Foreseeable Future“. It has been two years now and Intel can be seen to stick to their promise as seen that the upcoming Broadwell and Skylake CPUs will be headed for the consumer socketed platforms. AMD on the other hand are going to move away from their desktop based platforms to the mobility ones starting with Carrizo APU.

It should be noted that the Carrizo APU will be the first APU in AMD’s line to not only come to mobility first but also remain exclusive to mobility platform and possibly some all-in-one PCs (although soldered BGA variants). While AMD has not completely ditched APUs or CPUs on desktop platforms, it is somewhat disappointing that Carrizo is going to deliver action on the desktop side of things and its questionable at best whether we would get an Excavator based processor from AMD before the steam from the construction cores run out and AMD moves close to their x86 Zen core which will power their next generation processors. It’s also unclear how AMD will manage 2015 with no CPU update planned in sight prior to Zen however we will have to get in touch with AMD for an update on that matter.

As for Zen, if the initial rumors are anything to go by then Zen will likely adopt an SMT style microarchitecture which indicates that it’s quite a large core since SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) is usually leveraged in large CPU cores to opportunistically take advantage of the various resources in the core and dedicate it to an additional execution thread for added throughput. This adds to the area efficiency of the core design and reduces the effect of stalls and pipeline back pressure leading to improved resource utilization inside the core which in turn improves overall performance.

AMD Carrizo APU Comparison Chart: