AMD has officially unveiled new accelerated processing units (APUs) aimed at business customers, even as reports circulate that its funding talks with investment firm Silver Lake have hit the rocks.
AMD's latest APU designs, the mobile Carrizo and desktop Godavari, are being pushed towards business users - a smart move, given their relative paucity of performance compared with an Intel-based system and discrete graphics card. It's no surprise, then, to find AMD concentrating more on business-friendly features than overall speed when pushing the parts: the company boasts that the new parts are the first commercially-available chips to offer full Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) 1.0 compliance, the first 'commercial performance APU' to include a a secondary ARM core with TrustZone capability, the first to offer a full system-on-chip design, and the first to offer a hardware High-Efficiency Video Codec (HVEC) decoder for laptops capable of streaming Ultra HD content.
The highlight of the launch is undoubtedly the AMD Pro A12, a Carrizo-based mobile chip boasting a 3.4GHz peak boost frequency, four CPU cores and eight Radeon R7 GPU cores running at 800MHz and offering a total of 512 stream processors. The company has already won support from HP, which has launched the Carrizo parts in its latest HP EliteBook 705 laptop family. Lenovo, meanwhile, is taking the Godavari desktop parts into the fold, building them into the company's M79 Tower, EliteDesk 705 Micro-Tower, and a range of small-form-factor systems aimed at corporate use.
The welcome news of a fresh product launch comes as a funding deal that would have seen investment group Silver Lake take a 20-25 per cent stake in AMD hits the rocks, with Bloomberg reporting this week that discussions are on hold and AMD is looking at 'other strategic options' to secure the company's future. Neither AMD nor Silver Lake have issued comment on the matter.
AMD's latest APU designs, the mobile Carrizo and desktop Godavari, are being pushed towards business users - a smart move, given their relative paucity of performance compared with an Intel-based system and discrete graphics card. It's no surprise, then, to find AMD concentrating more on business-friendly features than overall speed when pushing the parts: the company boasts that the new parts are the first commercially-available chips to offer full Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) 1.0 compliance, the first 'commercial performance APU' to include a a secondary ARM core with TrustZone capability, the first to offer a full system-on-chip design, and the first to offer a hardware High-Efficiency Video Codec (HVEC) decoder for laptops capable of streaming Ultra HD content.
The highlight of the launch is undoubtedly the AMD Pro A12, a Carrizo-based mobile chip boasting a 3.4GHz peak boost frequency, four CPU cores and eight Radeon R7 GPU cores running at 800MHz and offering a total of 512 stream processors. The company has already won support from HP, which has launched the Carrizo parts in its latest HP EliteBook 705 laptop family. Lenovo, meanwhile, is taking the Godavari desktop parts into the fold, building them into the company's M79 Tower, EliteDesk 705 Micro-Tower, and a range of small-form-factor systems aimed at corporate use.
The welcome news of a fresh product launch comes as a funding deal that would have seen investment group Silver Lake take a 20-25 per cent stake in AMD hits the rocks, with Bloomberg reporting this week that discussions are on hold and AMD is looking at 'other strategic options' to secure the company's future. Neither AMD nor Silver Lake have issued comment on the matter.
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