AMD's Answer to Conroe?
Athlon Rumor Mill has posted some exceptional information regarding AMD's upcoming Rev G processors. Somehow, the editor managed to obtain die shots of both a current Revision F processor as well as an upcoming Revision G CPU. An animated clip overlays the two images and reveals the fact that there are some significant architectural changes. The wild card here is the use of two different stains in the die shots, a fact which can make the same objects look radically different. Regardless, the animation does seem to hint at some major changes though we'll wait for official word from AMD before we dive further into this rumor.
The extra hardware in between the L2 cache and the data cache is likely an out-of-order L2 read/write buffer that expedites data neeeded for execution. The large bank on the other side of the data cache would be the logical placement for an out-of-order load/store buffer. This prevents cache misses from waiting on Stores to main memory. The extra complex decoder was spotted by a poster on some website. It was the first feature that caught my eye. This shot is definitely not of K-8. Given the layout of the additions, their functions can be inferred.
