Posted on Tuesday, May 29 2007 @ 1:26 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Inq got their hands on some more information on AMD's upcoming Griffin platform:
On the surface, Griffin is a ground up reworking of the K8 to be a mobile component. All the enhancements you would expect are there, and it looks a lot like the normal K8. It isn't a question of what AMD did but more how it did it.
Let's look at the parts that didn't change all that much, the cores. There was no circuit-level reworking of the core, it is almost exactly the same as the older K8s. The changes came in with the power management and related infrastructure, the so called uncore.
Each core is run off its own voltage plane, so core 1 can be at the full voltage and frequency while core 0 is at the minimum. They are truly independent, Core 0 can be going full tilt at full frequency and voltage while Core 1 can be at the bare minimums for both. Neither core can be fully shut down however, they will always be minimally awake.
There are three voltage planes, VDD0 and VDD1 for cores 0 and 1 respectively, and VDDNB for the north bridge parts of the core. If you have to pick one thing that separates Griffin from K8 or even Barcelona, this is it.
Read on
over here.
