More details about AMD Llano

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Here is an interview with Samuel Naffziger from AMD which should shed some more light on AMD Llano:

http://www.insidehw.com/Editorials/I...sing-Unit.html

There is also this interview with Rick Bergman:

http://www.insidehw.com/Editorials/I...rd-Market.html

[jim]

Bit confused here.

So effectively, they're promising something along the lines of what we would've had if Intel had put a working Larrabee into the Clarkdale?

[Bitemarks666]

yes but it will be built in to the die instead of intels approach on popping a seperate die on the package, so in effect they will going the same way as the math co-processor and L2 cache both were off die and then moved on die

[scaryjim]

I think the maths co-processor comparison is a very valid one: iirc the new CPU core does away with a lot of the floating point units and will pass heavy flops work to the embedded GPU to deal with instead. I believe Larrabee was meant to be some kind of fusion of x86 instructions and stream processing, but (as we know) that got shelved - AMD are taking the stream knowledge from their graphics cores and adding it to an x86 CPU (kind of coming at it from the reverse direction to Intel).

Everyone seems to forget, however, that Intel have already fused a CPU, GPU and memory controller on one piece of silicon with the new Atoms. So I'm not sure how that differs from what AMD are trying to do... *shrug*

[Bitemarks666]

Intel have already fused a CPU, GPU and memory controller on one piece of silicon with the new Atoms. So I'm not sure how that differs from what AMD are trying to do

I think the difference is that the GPU in atom is low end and amd is trying mid to high end in theirs

[DanceswithUnix]

I think the maths co-processor comparison is a very valid one: iirc the new CPU core does away with a lot of the floating point units and will pass heavy flops work to the embedded GPU to deal with instead. I believe Larrabee was meant to be some kind of fusion of x86 instructions and stream processing, but (as we know) that got shelved - AMD are taking the stream knowledge from their graphics cores and adding it to an x86 CPU (kind of coming at it from the reverse direction to Intel).

Everyone seems to forget, however, that Intel have already fused a CPU, GPU and memory controller on one piece of silicon with the new Atoms. So I'm not sure how that differs from what AMD are trying to do... *shrug*

From my understanding, the Atom is a northbridge design placed next to an Atom CPU design on the same piece of silicon, such that they even still have an FSB between the two silicon halves (albeit a very short one so it aught to go like the clappers).

That makes it not so much fused, more like "cut & shut"