Excavator (microarchitecture)
| Produced | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Common manufacturer(s) | |
| Min. feature size | 28 nm bulk silicon (GF28A) |
| Instruction set | AMD64 (x86-64) |
| Predecessor | Steamroller – Family 15h (3rd-gen) |
| Successor | Zen |
| Core name(s) |
AMD Excavator Family 15h is a microarchitecture developed by AMD to succeed Steamroller Family 15h for use in AMD APU processors. On October 12, 2011, AMD revealed Excavator to be the code name for the fourth-generation Bulldozer-derived core.
The Excavator-based APU for mainstream applications is called Carrizo and was released in 2015. The Carrizo APU is designed to be HSA 1.0 compliant. An Excavator-based APU and CPU variant named Toronto for server and enterprise markets will also be available.
Excavator has been confirmed to be AMD's final revision of the 'Bulldozer' family, with two new microarchitectures replacing Excavator a year later. The next generation sister architectures will be the x86-64 Zen and AArch64 K12 architectures.
Excavator is expected to support new instructions such as AVX2, BMI2 and RdRand. Excavator is also expected to come with DDR3 and DDR4 memory controllers, currently not known if on the same die or mutually exclusive. Excavator is designed using High Density (aka "Thin") Libraries normally used for GPUs to reduce electric energy consumption and die size, delivering a 30 percent increase in efficient energy use. Excavator can process up to 15% more instructions per clock compared to AMD's previous core Steamroller.
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