AMD's officially announced processor line-up for 2015 includes two product categories at this stage: Carizzo, and Carrizo-L. Designed for mid- and low-power laptops, as well as other portable devices, Carizzo won't venture across to desktop-class devices.
This leaves a gap in AMD's product line for this year which, according to the latest reports, will be filled by a new product called 'Godavari'. Rather than engineering an entirely new processor for the desktop APU market, AMD will simply boost the performance of their existing Kaveri APUs through increased clock speeds. This would make Godavari a simple refresh of Kaveri.
One such processor rumored to lead the Godavari line is the A10-8850K, a variant of the A10-7850K with higher clock speeds. Specifically, the Steamroller-based quad-core CPU would see its turbo clock speed raised to 4.1 GHz (from 4.0 GHz), with the GPU also getting a clock speed boost from 720 MHz to 856 MHz.
As this is a basic refresh of the Kaveri line, it's expected that Godavari APUs will be compatible with existing FM2+ motherboards.
With reports of Godavari coming through, we're now getting a clearer picture of what AMD's product stack will look like:
- Carizzo will succeed Beema and some Kaveri mobile products, competing against Broadwell-U in the mid-range mobile market
- Carizzo-L swaps Excavator CPU cores for Puma+, designed for low-power mobile devices
- Mullins will continue to be available for ultra-low-power tablets and similar devices
- Godavari will succeed Kaveri in the budget and mid-range desktop market
Throw in some new ARM-based products, and the only category remaining is high-end desktop. It's unlikely that AMD will again reuse their Piledriver architecture for their FX performance range, so we'll have to wait and see where that product line goes.