14 DAY TRIAL // We've known that Advanced Micro Devices was preparing a successor to the Bobcat core, one that would actually help it establish itself on the entry-level notebook, nettop and tablet market, and now we have the chip in sight.
This isn't the Temash accelerated processing unit. That one is still months away, despite a reference tablet based on it having already been exposed.
Temash will debut during Computex 2013, a trade show that will take place in Taipei, Taiwan, in June.
That makes the new Jaguar processor a sort of placeholder, though an admittedly impressive one.
Based on the 28nm manufacturing process (it is the first such chip really), it has up to four x86 cores that are completely independent and share 2MB L2 cache (512 KB for each).
This is a clear difference compared to Bulldozer/Piledriver, which groups every two cores in so-called modules.
According to The Inquirer though, Advanced Micro Devices did not specifically deny the possibility of six-core and eight-core models in the future.
Jaguar x86-64-bit cores have a physical address 40 bits in width, which is greater than the bobcat's 36-bit.
On that note, the load/store bandwidth is of 16-byte/cycle, twice what Bobcat can offer, and the same goes for the 128-bit wide FPU data-path.
In layman terms, Jaguar is clearly better than the accelerated processing units (APUs) it will replace, even as its TDP range (thermal design power) is of only 52-25W.
Other advantages include 50 percent bigger scheduler queues, out-of-order execution, and ISA instruction sets usually only found in mid-range CPUs and better: AVX (advanced vector extensions), SIMD instruction sets (SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2 and SSE4A) and even encryption support (AES-NI).
Finally, battery power efficiency is ensured by the improved power-gating technology, which cuts power to inactive cores. The clock speed of those in use can reportedly go higher than 1.85GHz.
