RE: Power Management framework proposal

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Mon, 2007-07-23 at 13:29 -0500, Woodruff, Richard wrote:
> > > this seems to be contradicted by the fact that AMD is listing the
> > ability
> > > for each core to run at a different clock speed on the new 4-core chips
> > as
> > > an advantage.
> > 
> > that's a marketing thing mostly.. they all still run at the same voltage
> > anyway.
> 
> Several months back I recall seeing in several places that AMD's near term roadmap had each processor in its own voltage plane.  This was contrast to Intel which had it much further out.  As I recall the speculated reason was the silicon process Intel was using allowed them to put off that complexity longer.
> 
> http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=WE1VYQTG2ZE5YQSNDLOSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=196604387
> 
> http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=WE1VYQTG2ZE5YQSNDLOSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=199700463
> 
> Today TI has chips with multiple variable voltage planes so seeing the same out of a company like AMD is not so hard to believe.


I'm the last person to know details of unreleased AMD features (working
for Intel and all that) but all the things I've read so far suggest only
the memory controller will have it's own voltage plane, but that the two
cores still share the same plane.

Maybe there'll be a surprise when AMD launches the actual hw ;)

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