Quote Originally Posted by Raqia View Post
The best solution would be to sell the APU soldered onto a board w/o commodity dimms etc; instead, use soldered GDDR5 on a wide bus for > 100 GB/s of bandwidth for both CPU and GPU. There's no need for most consumers to have commodity dimms on their machines. At this level of integration, the whole system could be designed like a graphics card is today.
i think thats where itll ultimately end, but i highly doubt thats what llano will be already... even if they get rid of 128bit gddr3 and make that gddr5... then thats still not enough to really feed the cpu and gpu cores... and if they cant feed them, why put them on the die to begin with?

rcofell, thanks!
if you dont power down l1 and l2 then you dont save as much power, but youll be able to turn off the cpu cores a lot faster and more frequent... idk how much power cache consumes compared to the cpu cores, but id be surprised if cache consumes as much or more than the cores...
johan made some excellent experiments in his article on anandtech, and he came to the conclusion that turbo works great for servers, not so much because it overclocks the cpu, but mostly because it turns off cores and reduces their power very efficiently. even when the package was 60% loaded several cores spent quite some time in C6, and saved a lot of power that way.

im worried that with amd depending on L1 and L2 to be flushed and moved and copied and reloaded... they will either end up with sleeping cores when work needs to be done, or they wont be able to ever go to sleep as theres always some little work that needs to be done...

its ironic cause thats what made k8 so efficient, it could switch much faster from one power state to another than intels cpus, which saved a lot of power.