AMD hopes to grab more laptop design wins with Carrizo APUs

[HEXUS]

A single motherboard combined with flexible chip choice should aid in its adoption.

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[DemonHighwayman]

I wonder if this means that modders will be able to easily swap out the CPU to upgrade a system. In any case I'll look forward to seeing more news and details about this product.

[ET3D]

Streamlining is certainly a good thing, so I hope it works out for AMD.

[weblet51]

More choice is always a good thing. Hopefully it should mean that you won't have to make as many comprises when choosing a laptop if you have needs that fall outside the mass market.

[3dcandy]

As above, if an easy cpu/apu upgrade is available it will be great. However the chassis makers need to make it easier too - have a HP530 here and it's about 24 screws and about 30 mins to get in to swap the cpu!

[DDY]

I doubt the APU will be available in a socketed package. The industry is moving away from socketed mobile CPUs, AFAIK AMD doesn't even have an up-to-date mobile socket design and it wouldn't make sense for them to develop one now.

This slide indicates the APU will be available in a BGA package, i.e. soldered on board.

[Jedibeeftrix]

i'd guess this has as much to do with both big and little core solutions being SoC's now, making southbridges redundant, and thus encouraging a convergence of board design.

yes, from the PoV of laptops, i imagine this convergence is targeted at soldered designs rather than a new socket, but i still wonder about what this says about Carizzo-L...

will Carizzo-L adopt a 128bit bus to keep up with 22nm atom (not to mention 14nm atom)?
this would help the pin-out convergence with big-core Carizzo. differentiation would be managed by memory speed, from DDR3 1333 to 2133.

same question applies to IO; we know big-core Carrizo will reduce PCIe 3.0 lanes down to 8x (who needs 16x on a 25W product), will little-core move up from four, and will the same convergence happen with SATA3 and USB3.1?

i am very enthusiastic about the prospect of an 25W big-core Carrizo as a home-server, but on what socket would it arrive as a desktop part?

[ET3D]

The other day I thought about my Thinkpad X120e and realised that a new model (X150e or whatever; the current one is X140e) using Carrizo-L with Carrizo as an option would be great. That's what the same socket will enable, and I do hope Lenovo capitalises on it, because it would make for a really nice small laptop.

[DanceswithUnix]

i am very enthusiastic about the prospect of an 25W big-core Carrizo as a home-server, but on what socket would it arrive as a desktop part?

There were rumours a year ago that Carrizo would be FM2+ compatible, albeit with reduced PCIe lanes going to the graphics slot. That would probably involve switching off the integrated south bridge to use the one on the motherboard, which would be a shame.

We shall see. If Intel are not bothering to release Broadwell in socket form (http://semiaccurate.com/2015/01/05/i...8w-broadwells/) then hopefully AMD will see this as an easy market that they can step into.