AMD Zambezi news, info, fans !

[BeepBeep2]

ok so did you read Alpha article? point me to article re 16nm will be everything on SOI? Intel, tmsc will turn to SOI?

are you sure that zambezi and llano are manufactured under the same way? for me Llano doesnt clock well. My old Phenon II on 45nm clocks better, like 500mhz at least.

Due lower voltage tolerance, I suspect Llano is manufactured at different way, like "cold treatment". Brazo doesnt clock high either, but is suitable as low watt cpu. I dont think it depends on built in gpu, imho. At 32nm, Llano is supposed clock better than Phenom II.

Without L3, it makes easier to produce cpus also. Producing high density caches never been Amd/Gf strong point compared to Intel's. Hence more transistors.

Thats why Im excited to see Trinity, it will be interesting!

1. Parasitic Capacitance becomes a larger problem as nodes shrink. Maybe you didn't know, but a big reason Intel is using their "3D Gate" is to combat it, meaning they can stick with bulk silicon instead of having to move to the more expensive SOI just yet. Of course, they would be at an even greater advantage if they moved to SOI on 22nm (they would have a huge advantage). Parasitic Capacitance is directly related to parasitic delay which in turn I believe is closely related to gate delay.

Unless more semiconductor companies move to similar 3D tri-gates or very least FinFET, I assure you that they will be using SOI by 16nm...

2. Yeah, you're right. However Llano has a GPU on the die, weaker motherboards and VRM, also missing 200 pins. (Not sure how they pulled that off.)

3. I suspect the same thing, however Llano is not the same core as Phenom II and that is the reason it has 10% IPC increase in some applications. Still, there is a lot more to look at here than GlobalFoundries side.

4. Yes, but in this case it was left out because of cost/die size. I'm not sure how many % of power consumption is used purely by L3, but Llano could easily have matched a Phenom II X4 CPU running 200 MHz higher if it had L3, IMO.

5. I'm excited to see Trinity as well. Hopefully Piledriver brings substantial improvements, as it currently looks right know that it won't be "run cold".