Fourth Storm
Member
That's assuming that what we think are the texture units are actually texture units! What if the texture units are broken up, though? Let's say that the texture units are broken up a bit differently. You may have two blocks handling texture decompression (these would contain the L1 cache) and another two for the actual texture sampling and filtering. Q1 and Q2 may be the former, and T1 and T2 may be the latter. Their relative positions would be a bit odd, but very few positions seem to make sense on Latte.
On the other doubles, we could also have the ROPs divided into two. W1 and W2 might perform Z/stencil and U1 and U2 blend. That'd account for most of the double units, bar the small S1 and S2 blocks.
That is certainly an interesting proposition. I'll have to give it some thought. My gut feeling is that things are probably not that alien. Several blocks (V included) do seem to have direct counterparts in Llano. It's possible that things just look so strange to us because the design is different than the usual "ring" layout found in RV770 and Tahiti. Maybe spatial proximity isn't that important for some components either, so it was more a matter of, "How do we get all these blocks to fit on the die?"