De Vries gets under the skin of AMD's K8L

SCARILY ACCURATE chipmonger, Hans de Vries of Chip Architect, has been working away at the released die plots of the K8L Deerhound core.

He has produced a natty image here showing the functional blocks and how they have changed from the Rev F first generation Socket AM2 products.

De Vries was famously the first to discover proof of Intel's Yamhill x86-64 extensions in the Prescott core, long before Intel finally admitted their existence. He also used his magnifying glass to decipher the K8 core and its extra stages.

In the K8L he has spotted some clues to support the theory that there are now four instruction decoders. He also spotted a doubling of resources in the branch predictor.

Intriguing stuff if you're the sort who likes to put names to the mysterious looking squares on a CPU die plot! µ