S/A AMD Trinity Die Pic

[AtenRa]

Exclusive: Anyone curious about Trinity?

There is a dual-channel DDR3 controller up top, and the same rough count of PCIe lanes on the bottom, along with a display controller. This part looks very different from the older Llano, more in arrangement than anything else, the lane count still adds up to the same number. The blocks themselves are different enough to suggest PCIe3 instead of PCIe2, but that could very well be an artifact of the arrangement or the die shot itself.

Those two at the bottom are the HyperTransports and not the PCI-e lanes.

One more thing, from this die pic it seams that Trinity will have 384 Streaming Processors(SP)

 

[blckgrffn]

I really wish this was GCN based. From what I remember it was to be VLIW4, right?

 

[AtenRa]

I believe AMD have said they will use the tech from Cayman, i will guess they mean VLIW-4

 

[formulav8]

Its definitely NOT gcn. It should be VL-4 as mentioned above.

I'm more interested in the cpu core improvements than the gpu. Already know the GPU will even take out Intel's new blah junk.

 

[blckgrffn]

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2011110702_More_details_on_Trinity_core_leaked.html

Old news but interesting in this context - engineering sample clockspeeds.

Any news on when we might see these guys?

 

[T_Yamamoto]

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2011110702_More_details_on_Trinity_core_leaked.html

Old news but interesting in this context - engineering sample clockspeeds.

Any news on when we might see these guys?

Well bulldozer just came out..

 

[Ajay]

T believe I read somewhere that is was 2Q12, which seems tight with production starting this March (according to the same source as the OP).

 

[Phynaz]

If that's a real Trinity die shot I'll eat my own used underwear.

 

[wlee15]

What makes you think it's not real?

 

[Vesku]

If it is 384 VLIW-4 SPs then that would put it a little below the 6570 DDR3. Makes the rumored 20-30% faster than current top end Llano IGP seem reasonable.

 

[Phynaz]

What makes you think it's not real?

Because AMD isn't going to release a die shot this soon. Unless they just are completely giving up and saying "Here Intel, go ahead and start working on your marketing plans for when we ship this. We are very happy to give you a six month head start".

 

[dma0991]

Looks like it is still missing the L3 cache like Llano. I'd rather have an APU with a 10% lead in GPU performance compared to Intel and the bigger portion of the improvement is made to the CPU instead. I wouldn't be surprised if Piledriver cores would only have equal or less performance compared to Stars.

 

[MrTeal]

Wow, a 240mm^2 die. That's pretty mammoth compared to the 149mm^2 of the HD-3000 i3-2125 and still bigger than the 4C Sandy Bridge. I hope that they're really strong performers and can command the kinds of margins that will keep AMD in the black. These are supposed to be the products that save AMD.

I wonder how high they'll be able to clock the CPU? Even the FX-4100 is more power hungry running Prime95 than a 2700k. Unless Piledriver brings huge improvements to the party they might either have to clock so low to keep thermals in check that the CPU is as anemic as Llano, or they're going to have to go higher than the 100W TDP that Llano had.

 

[AtenRa]

Because AMD isn't going to release a die shot this soon. Unless they just are completely giving up and saying "Here Intel, go ahead and start working on your marketing plans for when we ship this. We are very happy to give you a six month head start".

If a remember correctly, AMD have said they are going to launch Trinity in Q1 2012, not Q2.

The SP count at 384 is for my interpretation of the die pic, which seams to be real.

 

[antisocialmunky]

What degree do you need to make sense out of this robot porn?

 

[beginner99]

Wow, a 240mm^2 die. That's pretty mammoth compared to the 149mm^2 of the HD-3000 i3-2125 and still bigger than the 4C Sandy Bridge. I hope that they're really strong performers and can command the kinds of margins that will keep AMD in the black. These are supposed to be the products that save AMD.

Yeah but IMHO these things are only useful in laptops. For desktops it is either you play games and go dedicated or you are fine with a hd2000/3000 from intel. What is there that requires the GPU on a PC expect for games?
The will become really useful when the GPU does some non-graphics parallel stuff.

 

[DeathReborn]

So which of the 6000/7000 series graphics cards will this Crossfire with? I assume they'll still be doing that, but what with the lower end 6000 & 7000 series being VLIW-5 I don't see how it will work.

 

[brybir]

Yeah but IMHO these things are only useful in laptops. For desktops it is either you play games and go dedicated or you are fine with a hd2000/3000 from intel. What is there that requires the GPU on a PC expect for games?
The will become really useful when the GPU does some non-graphics parallel stuff.

It is very useful in workstations that engineers and other professionals use. This is also true of graphics intesnsive applications like Adope products, Solidworks, and other programs that very much benefit from GPU assistance and have for some time now. This is a pretty large and profitable market.

I know that there are some companies that only need this type of assistance once in a while and would certainly not mind buying machines that are able to do general purpose stuff well and still provide a substantive boost in those programs that they may only use occasionally.

 

[MrTeal]

It is very useful in workstations that engineers and other professionals use. It is very useful to have a notebook that has a Quatro type card in it to do field engineering work or to do other data intensive activities that are aided by GPGPU stuff. This is also true of graphics intesnsive applications like Adope products, Solidworks, and other programs that very much benefit from GPU assistance and have for some time now. This is a pretty large and profitable market.

I know that there are some companies that only need this type of assistance once in a while and would certainly not mind buying machines that are able to do general purpose stuff well and still provide a substantive boost in those programs that they may only use occasionally.

They'll be useful in that market if the CPU isn't so slow that it completely negates the performance benefits from the GPU in those applications. I would be surprised to see APUs pushed hard into those areas, especially since they tend to be high margin and can support using a separate GPU and CPU. Even an entry level workstation like the Dell T3500 I have at my desk would destroy an APU based system, and while you could build a workstation cheaper with an APU, that's not really what that market wants.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

This has a lot of GPU on it.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

It is very useful in workstations that engineers and other professionals use. This is also true of graphics intesnsive applications like Adope products, Solidworks, and other programs that very much benefit from GPU assistance and have for some time now. This is a pretty large and profitable market.

I know that there are some companies that only need this type of assistance once in a while and would certainly not mind buying machines that are able to do general purpose stuff well and still provide a substantive boost in those programs that they may only use occasionally.

Most Adobe products benefit more from CPU than GPU. And heavy Adobe-using pros won't be using Llano and it's budget-minded computing ecosystem.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Because AMD isn't going to release a die shot this soon. Unless they just are completely giving up and saying "Here Intel, go ahead and start working on your marketing plans for when we ship this. We are very happy to give you a six month head start".

It might not be a "release", which would imply that the pic was released above-board. Also, there's nothing in the pic that is surprising to anyone who has paid attention to Trinity scuttlebutt. If you were to image your own die based on what we already know about Trinity, plus season it with a splash of rumors, the resulting pic would look very much like this. /shrug

 

[Phynaz]

If a remember correctly, AMD have said they are going to launch Trinity in Q1 2012, not Q2.

AMD has said a lot of things :\

 

[Idontcare]

It might not be a "release", which would imply that the pic was released above-board. Also, there's nothing in the pic that is surprising to anyone who has paid attention to Trinity scuttlebutt. If you were to image your own die based on what we already know about Trinity, plus season it with a splash of rumors, the resulting pic would look very much like this. /shrug

One thing that blows me away when I see the pic of Trinity, or Llano for that matter, is just how little real-estate is devoted to the core logic itself and yet it is the performance characteristics of that core logic that nearly entirely determines the selling price of the entire IC.

I mean just look at the ratio of CPU logic (difficult and complex to design) to the L2$ area (a dumb/easy copy-and-paste cell if there ever was one in design/layout).

Now obviously I am not saying this without consideration for all the obvious stuff (Pollack's Rule, Amdahl's Rule, Godwin's Rule, Hanlon's Rule, etc), but I can't help to feel that if they would only just throw their design/layout guys another 10mm^2/core budget then they'd be able to buy themselves some serious IPC improvements without necessarily making an already rather large IC become all that much larger.

Just look at the die area afforded to the hypertransport IO, or the DDR3 mem controller. Those parts of the CPU occupy nearly as much area as an entire bulldozer module, and yet it is the bulldozer module that is a performance-degrading CMT design by design just so a few mm^2 can be saved in a die that is already well over 200mm^2.

Doesn't this seem just a bit "penny wise but pound foolish" here? Why not widen out those castrated CMT cores back to being CMP demons, make your die a, gasp, 250mm^2 chip instead of the 240mm^2 it currently is, and put yourself in a position to field some competive IPC.

 

[AtenRa]

Just look at the die area afforded to the hypertransport IO, or the DDR3 mem controller.

I have made a mistake, Llano and Trinity doesnt have HyperTransports. Those are the PCIe, PLL and Display IO.