AMD Releases Image of Phenom/Barcelona Die

MojoKid writes "A few weeks ago, AMD released information on new branding for their desktop derivatives of the Barcelona core, now dubbed the Phenom FX, X4 and X2. If you're unfamiliar with Phenom, the processors will be based on AMD's K10 architecture. They've been tight lipped about specifics, but we know that it will feature a faster on-die memory controller, support 64-bit and 128-bit SSE operations, and they'll be outfitted with 2MB of on-chip L2 cache (512KB dedicated per core) in addition to 2MB of shared L3 cache. This week, instead of revealing some more of the juicy details regarding those enhancements, AMD just sent over a tasty photo of a Phenom die. At least it's something."

Comments

Re:and socket type?

[Eukariote]

Indeed so. Anyone having bought or buying an AM2/AM+2 desktop motherboard can drop in Phenom processors. When you have a performance AMD 4x4 (1,207-pin Socket F) board with FX processors, you can drop in the new quad core FX chips as well. Similarly, when you have a DDR2 Opteron server/big-iron, you can also upgrade.

That makes the current AMD platforms attractive: you can buy a cheap Athlon X2 chip to get good performance now, and later upgrade to a Phenom chip and get excellent performance and four-way multiprocessing. I plan to wait with my upgrade until the price comes down a bit.

Re:The advantages of four cores on a single die

[slashthedot]

The single die - four cores processor architecture from AMD could be a result of their collaboration with Sun which already has 8 cores in a single die general purpose processor UltraSparc T1 for more than a year. It's surprising though that the two chip makers, Intel and AMD, still lag behind Sun in terms of cores per die.