Unlike Kaveri, Richland and Trinity, Carrizo represents a significant departure from the way AMD used to design APUs. In many ways it is a ground-up redesign that is supposed to boost overall APU efficiency while also helping AMD's bottom line by leveraging existing technologies to achieve design goals normally set aside for drastic manufacturing process shrinks. Carrizo and the improvements built into its silicon can be considered the first phase in AMD's goal of achieving a 25x improvement in energy efficiency by 2020.

While there's only a minimal of details about what makes Carrizo tick (we'll get into a few of those below), we do know these new APUs will be available in two different segments. The standard performance-oriented processors are the subject of this article and will effectively replace Kaveri in the second half of this year, the Carrizo-L series will take over from Beema in low voltage scenarios. Both will share the same socket infrastructure even though Carrizo-L utilizes an updated version of the Puma architecture while Carrizo packs new Excavator x86 processing cores. Meanwhile, Mullins will be left to fend for itself in the ultra low voltage segment.