AMD’s First 20nm APU Rumored to be ‘Nolan’, Release Set for 2015

According to Fudzilla, AMD has plans to release its first 20nm part in 2015, coming to us in the form of a ‘Nolan’ APU. Once released, Nolan will succeed the light notebook-bound Beema, which should see its share of design wins at the forthcoming Computex event in Taipei. Beema itself will be replacing Kabini.

A highlight of Beema is that it will support HSA (heterogeneous system architecture), a feature that could greatly enhance a chip’s computing capabilities and give AMD an edge over the competition since the GPU it bundles in its APUs are self-built and are quite good. Nolan, then, should only improve things. The above-linked report states that the microarchitecture will feature a new core, but still use the FT3 BGA packaging and socket.

With its drop to 20nm, it’s expected that Nolan will be faster than Beema while requiring less power – especially on the standby side of things, an aspect of mobile computing that Intel really excels at with Haswell.

If AMD were able to release Nolan today, it would have beat Intel to the sub-22nm punch. Instead, once released, it’ll fall short when compared to Intel’s 14nm Haswell successor, Broadwell, which in all likeliness will drop later this year.