One more tidbit on use of ZRAM. It was licensed by AMD only this Jan: Message 22076826
Just very recently first die photo's have appeared that *MIGHT* show the use of ZRAM. This is quite early imo. Maybe too early. Only possibility that I see is that if AMD would have tried it out for at least a couple of more quarters before that. From the article referenced in above linked post:
“The dramatic increase in density offered by ISi’s Z-RAM embedded memory can enable much larger on-chip microprocessor cache memories resulting in improved performance and reduced I/O power consumption,” said Craig Sander, corporate vice president of technology development at AMD.
“We’ve looked at data from Innovative Silicon and it looks very promising. We still need to assure ourselves that this will work in our own application. We need to see how it scales and we need to make our own test vehicles,” he added.
Sander said those test vehicles would probably run on 65-nanometer and 90-nanometer manufacturing processes initially and the wafers would run at AMD’s Dresden, Germany wafer fabs.
However, Sander declined to say whether AMD was targeting the 65-nm manufacturing node for introduction, or how quickly AMD could deploy the technology. Sander said the introduction of Z-RAM depended not only on AMD’s investigation of the technology but was also tied to product plans. ...
Jones, an executive experienced in intellectual property licensing, also declined to comment on AMD’s timetable for introduction of Z-RAM but offered a more general perspective. “In the past it has been two years from when you sign a deal to when it is in production.”
So in Jan AMD stated it still had to create test vehicles, probably 90 and 65nm. In case the recent die photo's did show use of ZRAM for L3 it's quite a bit more than just a test vehicle. That would be pretty darn fast development, especially in light of Jones' last comment above. So:
- Isn't this too fast for inclusion in K8 prototype silicon?
- Isn't this way too fast for rev G, and even probably too fast for rev H?
- OTOH if the die photo's show ZRAM why would AMD show them if they wouldn't use it? Was it perhaps their only working 65nm Si, like in working with L3 disabled, and final silicon excluding it entirely?
Like Buggi I'm convinced there is something there. I'm just not convinced when we're going to see it used in real products.
Regards,
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