Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[jhalada]

chipdesigner,

My guess is that AMD will be moving to shared L3 (L2), probably getting rid of L2. The core, even under 90nm is probably in 40mm^2 ballpark (without L2, memory controller, HT and DRAM interfaces, so it may be possible to do 4-way under 90nm, with modest shared cashe of 1 to 2 MB, and end up in 300mm^2 ballpark.

Maybe AMD should put 5 cores on the chip and disable 1. Those IT folks' brains may enter an endless loop if AMD tries to sell them 3-core CPUs.

Joe