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Piledriver to surpass the 4GHz barrier with Resonant Clock Mesh

by Alistair Lowe on 28 February 2012, 10:37

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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We've heard suggestions for quite some time that new AMD CPUs and APUs containing the firm's 'Piledriver' cores will be able to reach and perhaps surpass 4GHz, however it has now been revealed just how AMD plans to pull this off and, it's with the aid of Resonant Clock Mesh technology.

The technology, developed by Cyclos Semiconductor, enables AMD to either, reduce chip-wide power consumption by 10 per cent, or increase clock-speed by 10 per cent with no impact on TDP, allowing the firm to reach new highs in speed and performance or new lows in power consumption for silicon bound for portables, all without the need of moving to a new manufacturing process.

"We were able to seamlessly integrate the Cyclos IP into our existing clock mesh design process so there was no risk to our development schedule. Silicon results met our power reduction expectations, we incurred no increase in silicon area, and we were able to use our standard manufacturing process, so the investment and risk in adopting resonant clock technology was well worth it as all of our customers are clamoring for more energy efficient processor designs," stated AMD designer, Samual Naffziger.

AMD Resonant Clock Mesh

The Resonant Clock Mesh functions by employing a mesh throughout the clock circuitry that, with the aid of Cyclos inductors, interacts with the signal's magnetic field, absorbing wasted energy, storing it in the mesh and subsequently, injecting the energy back into the system. The end result is simple, less wasted energy that would otherwise require dissipating as heat.

We eagerly await AMD's first 4GHz+ octo-core processor.



HEXUS Forums :: 24 Comments

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“We eagerly await AMD's first 4GHz+ processor.”

The FX4170 runs at 4.2GHZ and is on pre-order from many retailers already.
The technology, developed by Cyclos Semiconductor, enables AMD to either, reduce chip-wide power consumption by 10 per cent, or increase clock-speed by 10 per cent with no impact on TDP
Probably unfashionable of me, but I really quite like the idea of this being applied to a lowish TDP processor to cut it even further. E.g. an eight-core processor with a TDP of just over 80W.
crossy
Probably unfashionable of me, but I really quite like the idea of this being applied to a lowish TDP processor to cut it even further. E.g. an eight-core processor with a TDP of just over 80W.

Same, then i would overclock the :censored: out of it! :mrgreen:
CAT-THE-FIFTH
“We eagerly await AMD's first 4GHz+ processor.”

The FX4170 runs at 4.2GHZ and is on pre-order from many retailers already.

I should have said quad core and above!
Scribe
I should have said quad core and above!
The 4170 that Cat quotes is quad core - correction to your correction being “above quad core” perhaps? ;)
Biscuit
Same, then i would overclock the :censored: out of it! :mrgreen:
Well there is that. :D

Actually (he says showing his very low level of knowledge) I've always kind of wondered why, if TDP is such a big deal, that Intel and AMD don't follow the example set by some of IBM's Power processors and allow the system to power-down unused cores. Better still, have some mechanism that power's them down after POST until they're actually needed. After all, unless you're doing encoding work or games surely the majority of PC tasks (web browsing, media consumption, email, office, etc) don't actually need 8 cores running past 4GHz? Power saving for a normal desktop user could be staggering, while not compromising for those times that you do need all those eight cores.

It's the skinflint in me coming out - don't like the idea of spending cash powering processor cores that aren't actually doing anything useful apart from heating the room.