A closer look at AMD's upcoming "Fusion" APU based on the Bobcat ultra low power core.
The core is rather different than everything I ever saw and I'm wondering if this isn't another fake die shot for Intel to look at. My best guess at layout is:
This is based on the fact that both the presence of two cores and the GPU requires a good amount of cache and registers(a lot for the GPU). Again, this could be a complete fake, which is two what I'm most inclined to, since the CPUs are still a few months away and Intel can still rework specs on the Atom to make up some of the difference.
Remember the sentence from AMD's employee? "Actual die shots are released with launch".
The package and core are actually quite small. It will be very interesting to see how this performs. I'm not expecting big improvements compared to Intel CPU's other than the Atom, in fact I'm expecting them to still lag considerably behind Intel's CULV on a CPU performance basis only. Of course the presence of a decent, DirectX 11 compatible graphics card gives it a whole better value as a product.
Expect this CPU to be the first to unleash a flurry of OpenCL capable software in the next few years, unlike anything Nvidia is capable of delivering in the x86 market.
3 comments:
How about http://www.chip-architect.com/news/ontario_vs_atom.jpg
Definitely interesting. Seems a more accurate layout but I'm wondering why Intel's core is so much smaller.
Out of order logic on Bobcat should balance out the HyperThreading structures on the Atom and the dies are similar in instruction set capabilities. Even with 40nm process taking 80% of the size of the die, there is still a lot of die area to be accountable for.
The dies being located there pretty much confirms that it is a photoshop job to hide the details, there's no way the cores can look like that. The L2 is completely indistinguishable from the core itself.
It's very incredible to see that AMD got so small chip die size of Ontario. How come Intel's Atom Core is bigger than Bobcat Core in the same nanotechnology? I don't think AMD couldn't fight Intel with so small core if AMD got a chip from next century.
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