New Leak Hints At AMD's Carizzo Performance, Pits Favorably Against Intel
It's not too often that we get a preview of the performance from an upcoming processor from SiSoftware's Sandra database, but this becomes one of the rare exceptions. The victim is a 'Gardenia Carrizo' processor from AMD, one that represents the final Excavator-based models.
At CES, we learned that Carrizo will be a minor evolution of previous architectures, with a major emphasis on low-power. That's not the only change, though, as the chip could be bringing with it 256-bit AVX registers. That might not matter in the grand scheme for most people, but it's an improvement nonetheless.
For full performance details, I'd recommend hitting up the URL at the bottom of the post. We'll discuss a couple of the most important results here, which are the CPU arithmetic and multi-media tests, as well as memory bandwidth.
With performance of 28.59 GOPS in the Arithmetic test, we see that this Carrizo chip matches an Intel Core M-5Y70, which scores 28.78 GOPS. That chip was released in late Q3 and is featured in Lenovo's Yoga 3 Pro, which Dave took a look at in late November.
AMD's chip also performs well in the multi-media test in that comparison, scoring 76.99 MPix/s. The aforementioned M-5Y70 actually fell short of that, settling at 74 MPix/s.
Finally, we can also compare memory bandwidth performance. AMD's unreleased chip scores 14.76GB/s, which falls short of the 18GB/s the M-5Y70 hit. That's a notable drop, as both platforms used DDR3-1600 mobile memory.
All things considered, it appears that Carrizo might be worth keeping an eye on, because so far, it seems to come awfully close to the similarly clocked Intel Core M-5Y70, in one case even outperforming it. Of course, there's far more to a mobile CPU that's important than just a couple of performance metrics, so it's hard to conclude on anything until we're able to put Carrizo through its proper paces in our lab. If it holds up, though, it'll be nice to see Bulldozer and Excavator go out with a bang.
