With our review done I did the one thing I've been keeping myself from doing for the past week: I pulled the heatsink off my Kabini review notebook and grabbed a shot of the SoC.
I guess this is technically the world's first consumer quad-core x86 SoC. Haswell will come in a single-chip solution as well but only as a dual-core part. Kabini needs no companion platform/IO controller chip, everything is integrated on this single piece of silicon. There are also two GCN compute units in there.
I'm sure AMD will have more accurate numbers shortly, but using my completely unimpressive calipers I measured the die at 10.35mm x 10.35mm (107mm^2). I figure the actual number will be somewhere in the range of 104 - 112mm^2. AMD's 40nm Zacate by comparison (Brazos platform) was a 75mm^2 die, but that's not including the Hudson FCH (Fusion Controller Hub) which was around another 28mm^2. If you add those two up you get roughly the die area of a quad-core Kabini. The beauty of Moore's Law is that although die sizes may be similar, Kabini is appreciably quicker than Zacate.
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nunomoreira10 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
about the same ares as the exynos 5 octa.perhaps a comparison would be of value, arm vs x86
Wilco1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Yes we are awaiting the S4 Octa review, hopefully this time it will have real benchmarks rather than only JavaScript rubbish.GuMeshow - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
@AnandThe GX-420CA is basically an A6-5200 + ECC (and a few other bonuses), is there something in the works about the Kabini embedded G series?
Seems like ECC memory and dual Gb Ethernet would be interesting in things like Home/SMB NAS units and low power servers.
watersb - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I would be keenly interested in such an SoC for low-power servers. But a chip with lots of video hardware would be wasted on such an application. With the trend towards fully-synthesized cores in this generation of CPUs, are we going to see more diversity from AMD? Can they afford the risk?