Ajay
Lifer
- Jan 8, 2001
- 16,094
- 8,104
- 136
Excavator has an ATI high density library. AMD considers it equal to a full node shrink.
And work was being done on Excavator: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sheng-sun/7/7a4/89
I've seen other AMD profiles list design work done on XV (eXcaVator) but can't find them right now.
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It is possible that this is a color coded print out from the design tools, and parts of the design certainly do look synthesized. It is pretty grainy for a printout, but that could be purposeful.
The FPU doesn't look like 2x256 FMA to me, the bottom section looks like an FMA unit (2x128) with fully fanned out multipliers, but he top section has totally different logic. Granted, I'm very rusty on reading CPU die shots (was decent at doing so up to the P4), so I'm not sure if that fan out is representative of 64b muls or 128b.
Considering work has been done an XV and the fact that SR is late, I'm guessing that some of XV was grafted into SR and what we are seeing is Kaveri 2.0 - and that also jives with Kaveri being only a 2 module unit (and thus likely has a larger modules than PD in terms of actual size). Whether it's a real die shot, or a synthesized and somewhat blurry print out (or screen shot really, that probably makes more sense) is something that would be hard to tell, I would think, if it was done by someone within AMD with the correct skill set.
If it's real, it could signal a larger boost in IPC than we expected from Kaveri as well as higher multi-threaded performance.
In any case, I think it was leaked by AMD marketing to generate some noise to counter the info we are getting on Haswell.