Yes,but as he also points out, that stuff and more is included in, and takes up the lesser part of 50mm2 SoCs on 28nm. The unaccounted for area on A8 has more gates than those SoCs do in total.
Honest questions:
* Aren't the proportions of signed blocked in the two die shots roughly comparable between the 2 SoCs or is it just me? (GPU, CPU blocks, SDRAM...)
* Is transistor density the same across all blocks of a SoC or is that something that varies depending on block?
I'm just trying to catch up with you guys, since I can't follow so far
By the way:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8562/chipworks-a8
On A8 and its 20nm process this measures at 19.1mm2, versus A7’s 22.1mm2 G6430. As a result Apple is saving some die space compared to A7, but this is being partially offset by the greater complexity of GX6450 and possibly additional SRAM for larger caches on the GPU. Meanwhile looking at the symmetry of the block, it’s interesting that the blocks of texturing resources that every pair of GPU cores share is so visible and so large. With these resources being so big relative to the GPU cores themselves, you can see why Imagination would want to share them as opposed to building them 1:1 with the GPU cores.
That could mean an almost 50% difference in transistor count between G6430/A7 & GX6450. If transistor density is the same across the entire SoC then the G6430@A7 could account for something around 280Mio transistors and the GX6450@A8 around 420Mio transistors. How much exactly is ASTC devouring to get integrated?