AMD Details Jaguar; Preps Chip for PlayStation 4

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At this week's International Solid States Circuits Conference (ISSCC), AMD gave more details of its Jaguar architecture, which lies behind the upcoming "Kabini" processor, to be sold under the A4 and A6 brand names. It will also be used in Sony's PlayStation 4, which was announced earlier this week.

AMD formally unveiled the Kabini processor at CES last month, but this week's presentation disclosed many more details. Jaguar is what AMD calls an "accelerated processing unit" (APU), meaning it includes both CPU and graphics capabilities on a single chip. In the presentation, AMD stressed the improvement Jaguar offers over the Bobcat core used in the company's existing "Brazos" platform. Jaguar has four CPU cores instead of two, it doubles the size of Level 2 cache to 2MB, and it makes the cache shareable among all the cores. This is made on TSMC's 28nm process and the difference makes each core notably smaller than the Bobcat core, which was made on a 40nm process.

Jaguar is also at the heart of the AMD chip inside the PlayStation 4. The PS4 uses a semi-custom AMD APU, which includes eight CPU cores built on the Jaguar design, along with the company's Radeon graphics. The combination is said to deliver nearly two teraflops of performance. In other words, AMD took the same basic components of the chips it designs for notebooks and tablets (CPU cores, graphics cores, and other specialized features, such as video decoders and memory and display control) and combined them to create a special chip for Sony. The company has been widely rumored to be working on similar concepts for other gaming machines.

I wasn't at ISSCC this year, but in following reports on the show, I gather there were more details on some of the high-end processors discussed at last year's Hot Chips conference.

IBM revealed more details of its 5.5GHz System z microprocessor, which it says can run at up to 4.5GHz. This is an enormous chip with six cores and 2.75 billion transistors with a die area of 598mm2, produced on a 32nm process. It is destined for the System z servers (mainframes). Oracle disclosed more details on its new Sparc T5, which will run at 3.6GHz, and has 16 cores, each capable of running up to eight threads simultaneously, for a total of 128 threads. This is said to run at up to 3.6GHz, contains 1.5 billion transistors, and is made on TSMC's 28-nm process. As usual with the Sparc chips, it is aimed at very large systems and will likely find a home in Oracle's Exa line of high-end servers.

Chinese processor maker Loongson discussed its Godson-3B1500, a two-node eight-core 172.8Gflop/s MIPS64-compatible processor. This uses a new core with vector extension to the MIPS architecture, and the overall chip contains 1.14 billion transistors. It is a 182.5 mm2 die produces on a 32nm process. This is aimed at servers and should be on the market in 2014.

In addition, ASML discussed progress with its EUV tool, saying it believes the technology will be ready for real production in 2015 to 2016, and is suited for 10nm production; it could be extended to 7nm and even 3nm production.

Source: http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/none/308360-amd-details-jaguar-preps-chip-for-playstation-4