New AMD low power X86 core, enter the Jaguar

Some of the base methods like the activity counters go back several CPU generations, for which the GPUs were later adopters.
Turbo that bites into thermal margin is something AMD has recently caught up with Intel on, although taking a bite out of the device casing's thermal margin may be a further step to buy the chips enough breathing room at 28nm given their competition.

AMD admits the PSP was fused off in earlier silicon, and I share the mindset from the Realworldtech article on Jaguar that the turbo and and advanced power management hardware were mostly there in Jaguar, but not fully bugfixed or validated.
(It's not much of a leap given that AMD presented on Jaguar's expanded power management and clock scaling, and then almost completely failed save for one restricted SKU to make use of it.)
Something like this was probably the case between Trinity and Richland.

It's a tic toc within a chip's life cycle, which must be amortizing development costs or stretching schedules to allow fixed resources to phase in the full breadth of a design.
 
Looks like Jaguar is the end of the road for AMD's little core development.

The Jaguar (Puma+) core will find its way into a 20nm HSA compatible APU next year (SkyBridge), pin compatible with a similar A57-based APU (which will be an interesting comparison), but from 2016 AMD will concentrate on ARM and x86 variants of a big core architectural successor to Bulldozer.

http://techreport.com/review/26418/amd-reveals-k12-new-arm-and-x86-cores-are-coming

AMD is being a little vague but it seems the x86 line will still be targeting "dense servers, embedded, semi-custom and ultra-low power client". So I guess K12 may be a core aimed at 1.5~15W designs or something like that.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7991/amd-is-also-working-on-a-new-64bit-x86-core
 
Interesting quote from http://techreport.com/review/26418/amd-reveals-k12-new-arm-and-x86-cores-are-coming

AMD revealed that it is working on not one, but two brand-new, built-from-scratch CPU architectures. It has licensed the ARMv8 ISA and, in Dr. Su's words, "we are already well on our way to developing custom ARM cores." At the same time, AMD is building a brand-new, x86-compatible CPU core that will serve to replace Bulldozer and its lineage.
...
Presumably, these sister x86 and ARM cores will perform about the same, but they evidently are not just two variants of the same microarchitecture adapted to different ISAs. Keller was very complimentary about the ARMv8 ISA in his talk, saying it has more registers and "a proper three-operand instruction set." He noted that ARMv8 doesn't require the same instruction decoding hardware as an x86 processor, leaving more room to concentrate on performance. Keller even outright said that "the way we built ARM is a little different from x86" because it "has a bigger engine." I take that to mean AMD's ARM-compatible microarchitecture is somewhat wider than its sister, x86-compatible core. We'll have to see how that difference translates into performance in the long run.

The ARM core may end up being more powerful even though the x86 core is meant to replace the Bulldozer lineage if the A7's "Cyclone" is anything to go by.
 
Back
Top