AMD just gave your next laptop better graphics and a battery life boost

AMD Carrizo

AMD promised to deliver the goods with a new family of Carrizo processors that promised to be just as power efficient as Intel's Broadwell chips and they're finally here.

The APU makers has announced five new 7000 series chips that were formally known as Carrizo and Carrizo L.

Sitting at the low-powered end is AMD's E1-7000, a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU with Radeon Graphics and a very anemic 1MB cache. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there's the AMD A8-7410, which features a 2.5GHz quad-core processor paired with Radeon R5 graphics and support for faster 1866MHz memory.

In between these two extremes, AMD has also introduced chips ranging from a 1.8GHz quad-core E2-7110, 2.2GHz quad-core A4-7210 and the 2.4GHz quad-core A6-7310.

Reaping the benefits

The new chips features a 28nm silicon, which should make them more energy efficient compared to the previous generation - keeping between 10 to 15 watts of total power draw.

At the same time, AMD has made strives to significantly boost the performance of the on-board Radeon graphics while adding support for DirectX 12.

Aside from the new CPUs, AMD also introduced a new Radeon M300 series of high-performance graphics cards for laptops. These new GPUs will be available in Alienware, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Toshiba notebooks in the near future.

AMD is fighting hard not to be forgotten in the rising tide of Intel and Nvidia products. Earlier this week, the Sunnyvale-based company outlined its desktop roadmap includes a new x86 processor core named Zen and plans to utilize high-bandwidth memory with its next generation of GPUs due in the second half of 2015.

Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee was a former computing reporter at TechRadar. Kevin is now the SEO Updates Editor at IGN based in New York. He handles all of the best of tech buying guides while also dipping his hand in the entertainment and games evergreen content. Kevin has over eight years of experience in the tech and games publications with previous bylines at Polygon, PC World, and more. Outside of work, Kevin is major movie buff of cult and bad films. He also regularly plays flight & space sim and racing games. IRL he's a fan of archery, axe throwing, and board games.