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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pgerassi who wrote (233106)	5/18/2007 3:28:02 PM
From: dougSF30	Respond to of 275872

Look for Griffith to have things like load/store reordering, sideband stack optimization, 32 byte ifetch, wider L1 L2 paths and other such things that help integer IPC. What's "Griffith", Pete? Is that your imaginary AMD mobile part that ISN'T the K8 core than Griffin is? If you meant "Griffin", then you aren't making sense, as usual, in telling people to "look for" K10 core features in a K8 core.

To: pgerassi who wrote (233106)	5/18/2007 4:35:28 PM
From: NicoV	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

My thoughts on Griffin: Last year (on AMD's tech day IIRC) Dirk Meyer spoke about doing the work needed to make CPU's modular, i.e. cleaning up the interfaces between the building blocks to make them more reusable. AMD's tech slides these days also mention a lot of different blocks combined together in way that makes the most sense for the end product (e.g. fusion slides). What we see in Barcelona and Griffin is probably the first result of that work: -> shared: optimised memory controller (write buffering) -> separate voltage per Core: Griffin, moving to a Barcelona derivative later. -> HT3 with power savings: Griffin, moving to a Barcelona derivative later. -> FPU increase: Barcelona -> L3: Barcelona IIRC, AMD has shown slides where their CPU's moved to 2 different designs, one power optimised (Griffin family), one performance optimised (Barcelona). Barcelona probably has a lot of overhead making quad core feasible (e.g. an 4 way SRQ) that don't make sense in a mobile design. Adding all those new features may also cost a lot in power consumption: 5-10 Watt may not mean a lot for a server CPU, but it means a lot for a mobile CPU. A mobile design would benefit a lot more from 30% across the board power savings thant from 30% extra performance (mainly in HPC), so it makes sense to stick with K8 for the mobile branch and optimise that for low power. E.g. there are a lot more power modes in Griffin than in the current K8 (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2992&p=2). Assuming a 2Ghz Griffin, the lowest frequency would be like 250Mhz, which would be enough e.g. to check email and show it on a MS Windows Vista SideShow display. A Core2 Duo can't do that, it' probably run out of battery after a couple of hours, while Griffin could do that probably an entire day.