http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/ibms-8-core-power7-twice-the-muscle-half-the-transistors.ars

IBM’s 8-core POWER7: twice the muscle, half the transistors

Speaking of a POWER7 core’s back end, each core contains a very robust suite of execution resources. There are 12 execution units in total, broken down as follows:

• 2 integer units
• 2 load-store units
• 4 double-precision floating-point units
• 1 branch unit
• 1 condition register unit
• 1 vector unit
• 1 decimal floating-point unit

話說好像把POWER7整個遺忘了….4DP乘加+1個vector+1個十進位浮點。

雖然不能同時使用，不過4個DP乘加本身就已經有點誇張。記得Nehalem和Tukwila都是2乘加？

這樣反而變成load/store和記憶體頻寬吞吐夠不夠….能省電晶體的原因好像是因為32MB on-die L3用eDRAM。

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總是有人要開第一槍(噴飯)

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/9/30/nvidia-gt300s-fermi-architecture-unveiled-512-cores2c-up-to-6gb-gddr5.aspx

nVidia GT300’s Fermi architecture unveiled: 512 cores, up to 6GB GDDR5

GPU specifications

This is the meat part you always want to read fist. So, here it how it goes:

* 3.0 billion transistors

* 40nm TSMC

* 384-bit memory interface

* 512 shader cores [renamed into CUDA Cores]

* 32 CUDA cores per Shader Cluster

* 1MB L1 cache memory [divided into 16KB Cache – Shared Memory]

* 768KB L2 unified cache memory

* Up to 6GB GDDR5 memory

* Half Speed IEEE 754 Double Precision

DP一口氣拉高到半速(等於全速啦)，每個shader cluster變成32core，不過其實看起來比較像是4個以前的8sp合併成32sp，同時shared memory也合併了4片變成64KB，同步的需求就變小了。

話說cluster變大，那麼和TMU之類的比例其實也可能變了，比方說可能變回2個cluster一組大core？然後又變成8x2x[32sp+16TMU]這樣。

這次最重要的是有個全core共用的768KB L2 unified cache memory，而且合併的64KB share memory可以切成兩塊(16KB+48KB)，各自當成scratch pad memory和cache(用途可互換）。至於RV870的32KB LDS只能當scratch pad不能當cache。