Excavator (microarchitecture)

AMD Excavator Family 15h is a microarchitecture developed by AMD to succeed Steamroller Family 15h for use in AMD APU processors and normal CPUs. 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 was also produced.
Excavator was the final revision of the "Bulldozer" family, with two new microarchitectures replacing Excavator a year later.
Excavator was succeeded by the x86-64 Zen architecture in early 2017.
Architecture.
Excavator added hardware support for new instructions such as AVX2, BMI2 and RDRAND.
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.
Processors.
APU lines.
There are three APU lines announced or released:
CPU Desktop lines.
There are no plans for Steamroller (3rd gen Bulldozer) or Excavator (4th gen Bulldozer) architectures on high-end desktop platforms.
Excavator CPU for Desktop announced on 2nd Feb 2016, named Athlon X4 845.In 2017, three more desktop CPUs (Athlon X4 9x0) were launched. They come in Socket AM4, with a TDP of 65W. In fact, they are APUs with their graphics cores disabled.
Server lines.
The AMD Opteron roadmaps for 2015 show the Excavator-based "Toronto" APU and "Toronto" CPU intended for 1 Processor (1P) cluster applications: