A web site based in China has released an unknown block diagram that shows an extremely powerful upcoming system-on-a-chip (SoC) by AMD with many processing cores, a powerful graphics engine and plenty of memory bandwidth.
The information is completely unofficial but if true AMD may have a very powerful product on the market soon. In fact the reported SoC is a very strange creation – it has all the blocks of a future APU namely a security co-processor (ARM Cortex-A5), support for AMD-V, AMD-P blocks, a unified northbridge, a system controller hub, Hyper-Transport links, PCI-E 3.0 lanes, CrossFireX interface and – please note – eight Steamroller processing cores (with the corresponding integer/floating point execution units and L2 cache), eight 72-bit DDR3 memory controllers, a display controller, unified L3 cache and a decent GCN-class graphics core.
Currently it is unclear where such a chip may find an application as it will surely be very large even if built on 28 nm technology. If this chip actually exists it may rival the performance of the upcoming Intel Haswell processors and in case of need it may have some of its execution units disabled in order to serve lower-end markets.
So far AMD has said nothing on the story. Again, the block diagram may be fake but stay tuned to Hitechreview for more information when it becomes available.
Source: X-bit Labs