More Details about AMD's Griffin Emerge

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, May 28, 2007, 04:00 PM EDT

The Inquirer has an interesting article posted today regarding AMD's upcoming Griffin mobile processor. When the news about Griffin and Puma broke a couple of weeks ago, there weren't many details available about the architecture and design of the new CPU, but The Inquirer has since uncovered some information that paints a more complete picture.

"Griffin has DDR2 and HT3 both of which Barcelona can do. On the surface, it looks like Griffin is the K8 cores with the Barcelon uncore bits. That is not correct. The new uncore parts hit many of the same checkboxes that Barcelona does, but they are independent projects, the bulk of Barcelona was done is Austin while most of Griffin was created in Boxborough.

The reason for this was pointed out by Griffin architect Maurice Steinman - you don't want to pay for performance you don't need in a laptop CPU. There are obvious parts to this philosophy and some very non-obvious tradeoffs."

There are a number of other details in the article as well, including information about A0 silicon hitting AMD's test labs on a Friday and booting Windows by that Sunday.

Tags: AMD, Merge, griffin, Mer, eta, eme, TAI, AI, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com