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

wow a photo

[jonathan DS]

can you see how fast it is? How about some specs we understand?

Re:wow a photo

[farkus888]

well marketing now tells us the number of cores is the only important factor in performance. this has 4, most desktop pc processors are 2 right now, that makes it exactly twice as fast as current processors.

Re:wow a photo

[luder]

Well, if I understood correctly, it still has overheating issues, as they're only capable of delivering a photo of a dead processor. Also, on a side note, isn't it funny that there's a website specially dedicated to hot hardware?

Re:wow a photo

[Jacer]

I understand your cynicism. Especially considering how a lot of processor intensive applications that most consumers use (games and other multimedia, and to a small margin running outlook, internet explorer, and MSN messenger together) get absolutely no benefit from SMP. However, as multi-core chips are rapidly becoming the defacto must have for everyone, I think developers are going to start coding to take advantage of this. We've already heard plenty of rumors about offloading most/all of the physics processing onto a chip that does it's computations in matrices rather than in any sort of linear fashion, streamlining the process both in method of computation and by freeing up your cpu cycles any number of other tasks (potentially an increase in game artificial intelligence, so it behaves less predictably, maybe do away with all of the nested tree structures and boolean choices) The only potential problem is increasing the complexity of development. Applications to take full advantage of all the new widgets will also take exceedingly more development time, support time, QA time, ect which will (alm0st) inevitably lead to a rise for consumers.

Hype it up

[jhfry]

I know that this is just a ploy to build up hype for the new processors... I just hope that the processor performs up to expectations.

AMD really needs to respond to the Core 2 Duo's with something that tells the world that they are still in the race. I really don't want to see Intel become the unchallenged winner of the silicon wars... it would hurt us users in the long run.

I fear that it is a real possibility however. The cost of fabs, R&D, and marketing have grown so much in the last few years that it would be VERY difficult for any newcomer to compete with Intel unless they managed to develop a completely different and low cost way to manufacture their chips... or they are very heavily backed.

Re:Hype it up

[ChrisMaple]

The only reason that AMD is still alive is that Intel made a series of blunders. Intel went exclusively with the expensive RAMBUS technology, kept the northbridge off-chip, chose clock speed over processing power. During the same period AMD integrated the memory controller, developed hypertransport, and emphasized processing power over clock speed. As a result, for several years AMD maintained a small performance advantage and slowly gained market share. Because Intel maintains a superior process technology, AMD's advantage was only a small one. Intel is much larger and can afford the huge expenses invloved in keeping the process advantage.

Now that Intel is mostly past its blunders, it still has the advantage of superior process and is likely to maintain that advantage. Unless AMD can pull more rabbits out of its hat, its goose is cooked. I want AMD to regain the performance lead, but I don't think it's going to happen.

The advantages of four cores on a single die

[Eukariote]

On-chip connectivity can be much broader and lower-latency than off-chip connectivity. The two-dual-core in one package "quad cores" of Intel have to talk via the off-package north bridge. As you can see from the AMD Barcelona/K10/10h snapshot, the cores live together on a single piece of silicon.

The space between the the cores is a very broad crossbar, allowing fast inter-core synchronization/cache-coherency. The uniform block at the edge of the chip, outside the cores, is the L3 cache shared by all four cores. Each core has its own L1 and L2 cache. This design is nicely symmetric: each core has equivalent resources. It should do very well on heavy-duty symmetric multiprocessing applications.

Re:The advantages of four cores on a single die

[Eukariote]

According to Intel engineers though, communication between the chips was never a bottleneck

What a load of crap. For quite a few applications, it definitely is a bottleneck. If you have single-threaded tasks that sit happily on their own processor and do not intercommunicate, then, yeah, it does not matter much what connectivity the cores and dies have. But in the real world, multi-threading and SMP tasks do need to intercommunicate, often heavily so. Also, processes will often migrate from one core to the next because the core it was running on before is in use. At that moment, fast inter-core synchronization of the caches is very helpful.

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.

Re:The advantages of four cores on a single die

[TheRaven64]

The number of cores per die is limited by two things:

1. Number of transistors per die.
2. Number of transistors per core.

Sun can put more cores on a die by having fewer transistors per core, it's as simple as that. Sun is bucking industry trends quite heavily at the moment (see here) by reducing the amount of die space take up by cache. Intel are right at the opposite extreme, with well over 50% of the Itanium die taken up with cache. Modern x86 chips are sitting at around the 50% mark. Intel could easily make a quad core chip with no cache for the same price as their dual-core chips, but performance would be much worse. They could make a single core chip with 50% more cache for the same price, but, again, performance would be worse.

Exactly what the best trade-off is depends on your workload. Sun are aiming at the web-app server market. It's a good business decision, since this is a rapidly growing area. It's also one of the easiest workloads to run, since it's inherently massively parallel; each web-app typically has a few tens to a few thousand users per server. If one thread in a T1 has a cache miss, then there are a huge number of others that are able to take advantage of the processing resources. Intel and AMD have to support a lot of legacy single-threaded code. A cache miss in one of these is expensive. Main memory accesses are of the order of 100-200 cycles, and so a cache miss every 100 cycles would cause a 50% performance reduction. For the T1, with its 8 contexts per core, it would cause a negligible performance reduction overall, as long as the other threads still have work to do.

and socket type?

[Danathar]

And it will probably require ANOTHER slot type and force me to upgrade my motherboard yet AGAIN!

Geeze...please let me keep my motherboard for 6 months!

Re:and socket type?

[Josef Meixner]

In every press release AMD stated it will run in AM2 sockets. If I remember correctly it will not be able to use the new hypertransport links, support for the new power saving functions (it can switch off complete cores if they aren't needed) in AM2 sockets, it will need AM2+ for that. Sorry, I am far too lazy to search for a reference for those last bits of information, it is something I read in a magazine (paper version).

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.

WTF?

[GreatBunzinni]

Photos of processor dies? WTF is this? Some kind of porn for uber-geeks?

Today's processor marketing explained to geek

[DrYak]

sed " s/number of GHz/number of cores/ " marketing.txt

Re:a mobile version?

[Eukariote]

For mobile, AMD has gone a different route for now, they have reworked the K8 for extremely low power: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39 894. The two cores and memory controller get independent voltage planes. And the cores can clock up and down independently. It makes good sense: for mobile, low power is crucial.

Many of the high-end features (double FPU units, hypertransport interconnects, and so on) of the Barcelona design are not required for a laptop, and add power draw caused by static leakage, even when not in use. In due time, though, AMD will no doubt rework the K10/Barcelona core into a mobile design. Probably they will release a moderately power mobile Barcelona version before that, for high-end workstation type laptops.

Shhhhh!

[dreamchaser]

Some of them are busy fapping to the pic right now, so hush. You'll spoil the mood.

Danger! Danger!

[eebra82]

Now that AMD released high-res pictures of this core, Epson can use their transistor printers we have read about and start selling this CPU ahead of AMD. Good job, AMD!

Re:Direct links to JPEGs

[instanto]

I am thinking Sim City when I see this

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/Digit alMedia/43263A_hi_res.jpg

Looks like the industry areas are quite big, wonder how the pollution in that city is.

No fires though, so that is a good thing.