AMD Ryzen die shot and other slides from ISSCC emerge

[HEXUS]

Die shot close-ups are joined by slides highlighting Zen architecture advances.

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[Ozaron]

So I suppose people will now be attempting to define the character of XFR? It will have its own personality, being aggressive on clocks or passive. Overclockers the world over will get competitive with it, trying to return better results manually.

Offers up a few questions, though. Will it have upper clock limits? How fast can it decide what the best boost is? If recording temperature change over time is the method for deciding cooling reliability, I can't imagine it boosting up very quickly.

[Tabbykatze]

Offers up a few questions, though. Will it have upper clock limits? How fast can it decide what the best boost is? If recording temperature change over time is the method for deciding cooling reliability, I can't imagine it boosting up very quickly.

IIRC from the presentation in December, Lisa Su said "If you have the cooling capacity, it will keep clocking up". This implies it may not have a headroom and it's theoretical headroom will be the high frequency instability which can be mitigated with smart branch prediction to prevent interlocks and run away scenarios...soooo in short, maybe it doesn't have a theoretical headroom, but is limited by the stability of the transistors at high frequencies.

[Corky34]

At a guess XFR will be like similar tech from Intel and Nvidia in that the upper limit will be set by voltage and/or temperatures, going on leaks (usual pinch of salt) there's going to be some form of utility for adjusting things.

[SHSPVR]

There a benchmark on Guru3d

[el_tone]

If the single core performance on those leaked benchmarks (on par with a i7-6850k) are to be believed, things might be about to get very interesting in the CPU market.

[MercutioUK]

Might see a return to some of the more crazy cooling options.

Vapochill PE/XE/LS anyone?