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- Date:
- Friday , May 18, 2007
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
AMD's Griffin Processor & Puma Mobile Platform
We got the skinny on the upcoming Griffin Mobile platform that will be offered by AMD in the future. While Griffin is not truly an enthusiast body of work, these slides do contain some very forward looking information.
While we were out at the AMD CTO Summit last week in California, AMD took the time to show off their upcoming Griffin mobile processor and Puma platform. I am not going to try to paint a glorious picture of what AMD is doing in the upcoming mobile space as it is not very exciting from an enthusiast standpoint, but what is interesting though is how it outlines AMD’s move towards its Fusion processor line as well as the levels of power savings that are being implemented on the mobile side of the business.
Below is the AMD’s presentation in its entirety.
Griffin is the processor that will lie at the heart of the Puma mobile platform. AMD has done some great things with low power processors over the last year. I am currently running a 35w Athlon dual core desktop part in my home business system and it is by far the coolest running machine I have seen in years. Much of that technology translates directly to Griffin. Griffin is based on the K8 architecture and is dual core as the slide shows, but also represents what is a SOC or “system on chip” to some extent. What we are not seeing here is the GPU portion being “fused” into mix quite yet.
The above slide will probably outline what is most exciting about Griffin. As noted the “Northbridge” is now on-die and is where the SOC terminology comes from. The memory controller on the chip is to be expected from AMD, but now even a HyperTransport 3.0 controller is on-die. You will likely never need HT3 in this mobile device, but it costs the same as implementing HT so why not?
You will see the mention of separate power planes for the CPU and Northbridge portions of the Griffin processor. What this allows is for the Puma platform to scale voltage and frequency of the CPU cores and Northbridge dynamically eliciting a power savings instead of both being fully scaled at all times during usage. The Griffin can even go as far as halting the CPU while still in operation such as during usage of a slide presentation or similar application. Griffin can basically put cores to sleep and still move static pixel data from the frame buffer.
“Granularity” is this year’s new tech buzzword. I heard it enough in the last two weeks that if I had a grain of sand for each time, I could have my own beach by now. That is not to say it is not accurate in what it describes and in the mobile spectrum “Fine Grain Power Management” is likely more important that it will ever be to a desktop user just due to the fact that we don’t have to worry about our desktops shutting down due to a low battery. Quite simply stated AMD is making inroads to finding more sophisticated ways of extending mobile devices battery life on a system level. They are projecting that Puma will easily move into the 5+ hour spectrum of usage.
The dual core Griffin processors will be rated at 35w TDP using 65nm process.
Considering all of the dynamics given here you have to wonder how long it takes to scale up a halted CPU when you need it. Obviously you don’t want to sit around waiting for your notebook to wake up when you need it. AMD explained to me that Windows Vista does a much better job at scaling CPU than XP did. Where as XP landed in the millisecond response range, Vista now operates on a microsecond range making these power savings efforts transparent.
While in some ways Griffin is revolutionary, as it is adding more controllers onto the processor die itself, if certainly is more of an evolutionary part. Considering that we are seeing K8 core architecture being used that is already at a disadvantage to Intel’s Core 2, we know that Griffin is not going to be a performance leader. There is some argument about whether or not you even want to be the performance leader in the mobile space as more and more people are worried about battery life and weight. I myself opt for a sub-3 lb. notebook with incredible battery life rather than toting around a 6 pound laptop I have to worry about plugging in every time I use it. I was the only person at the CTO Summit that did not plug their laptop into AC the entire time we were there, but no doubt many would have opted to.
Power considered, we all know that K8 architecture is no slouch when it comes to performance. AMD thinks that having two full K8 cores in a notebook will be more than efficient and it is aware that it is not going to be winning the application performance metrics, but hope that it is hitting a good balance between processor performance and processor power usage.
Sadly we end on a sour note here. It will be mid-2008 before we see this Griffin processor and Puma platform come to market. While we certainly see headway being made towards AMD’s new Fusion processor, they are going to have some very tough market battles to bear till we hopefully see true a “Fusion” in 2009 that represents a unique and revolutionary piece of silicon.
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