JohnnySasaki86
Member
Lock if old, but I did a quick search and did not see this posted.
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.
It seems the main difference was the move down to 28nm and doubling to 4 cores, but it does look like Jaguar cores do offer a significant performance gain over the Bobcat cores. Close to 20% more flops per core. I don't know what a lot of this stuff means, but it looks like the information came from these slides. They go into a lot more detail about the Jaguar processor. I was hoping that someone with more technical know how could go through them and see if there's anything noteworthy. How many gflops is 194490?
It seems like Sony and AMD just took two of these things and duct taped them together. We probably wont know what other customization's may or may not been done until we can get a die shot of it. I'd really like to know how this CPU will compare to Xenon.
http://www.hardware.fr/marc/ISSCC2013-Final-v5.pdf
http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/none/308360-amd-details-jaguar-preps-chip-for-playstation-4