Stefan Mileschin

AMD is trying to make us guess what it will be launching on April 29, but it really does not take much effort.

It released a teaser page which shows portions of an unknown die, which will be launched in a day or so.

However, the unknown die looks surprisingly similar to previous generation of Kabini systems-on-a-chip:

According to CPU World, the top row contains contact pads, and there are also memory contact pads on the left side of the die. The second row - two rectangle blocks and an "A" block between them - contains L2 cache and associated logic. The next row, shown as a dark area on the unknown die picture, contains 4 CPU cores. The GPU is located to the left and below the CPU cores.

In other words, there are so many similarities between the unknown and Kabini dies, that it suggests that the Beema core is a tweaked Kabini core with improved IPC and beefed-up graphics.

It seems that AMD did not do a complete redesign. What we can expect is better graphics and CPU performance which is sort of the goal of any refresh.

Of course, we don't know how much extra performance we will get, there are all sorts of variables which cannot be seen from a snap. AMD has kept a lid on information such as clock speeds of chips.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-rolls-the-kabini-die