AMD to have no desktop version of Carrizo APU

Word hit the web that AMD has no plans to market its Carrizo chip for the desktop market. The Tech Report writes AMD has no plans to ship a socketed version of Carrizo, the chip may show up in some All-in-One desktop PCs but other than that it will have to face off against Intel's Broadwell-U in the laptop market.

Carrizo is based on the Excavator core and features next-gen GCN integrated graphics, whereas Carrizo-L is based on the Puma+ cores and will be billed as an evolution of the current Beema APU. AMD's Carrizo and Carrizo-L chips are expected to hit the market by mid-2015.

Also being demoed was a hidden Carrizo dev box that showed smooth 4K H.265 video decoding. The demo was pitted against a Broadwell system, which struggled with the same workload. We're told Carrizo's UVD video decoding block can handle H.265 content natively without help from the GPU's shader core.

In terms of power draw, AMD expects to match Broadwell-U's "full dynamic range," with TDPs ranging up to 35W. AMD didn't share a lower limit, but it did note that Carrizo won't quite manage to slip into the 5-6W TDPs required for fanless tablets. We should "expect" Carrizo systems to be actively cooled, the company says. (For reference, Broadwell-U is available in 15W and 28W flavors, and some of the 15W parts can be configured down to 7.5W.)