AMD Istanbul chip die picture

[Nedjo]

Famous Hans De Vries (www.chip-architect.com) has posted picture of AMD's new Istanbul core over the Aceshardware forum (www.aceshardware.com)

Here's what Hans has to say:

"It's probably not a bad idea for AMD to take advantage of their relatively
small core size. At 45nm it can cram two cores (with 256 kB L1 total) into
30mm2. A single Nehalem core with 256 kB L2 also occupies ~30 mm2.

So in terms of IPC/mm2 you get two cores against one core with 2 threads."

"The 8 core Nehalem seems to be a megamacholomaniamonolitic die.
larger still as Dunnington (700 mm2 ?) More for bragging rights
purpose as for profitability, considering that it will be rather TDP limited.

Istanbul could be at or just below 300 mm2. Istanbul/Sao Paulo should
become a mass market 32nm device so it's not a bad idea in terms of
risk reduction to develop them as server/workstation chips at 45nm."

I completely agree with Hans on this:

"It is better to add cores, to 6 in total, as to extend the L2 caches from
512kB to 1MB per core on a 4-core device as was planned with Montreal."