Stefan Mileschin

On a more curiosity-related tangent, thanks to this week’s Hot Chips conference we finally have some good die shots of AMD’s Southern Islands GPUs – Tahiti, Pitcairn, and Cape Verde. For the last few years AMD has shied away from releasing die shots, due in part to the fact that with AMD releasing their GPUs months ahead of NVIDIA, they haven’t been eager to let NV see their GPUs up close any sooner than necessary. As a result we haven’t had the chance to see the physical layouts of AMD’s recent GPUs in great detail, at least until now.

Note that these die shots aren’t strictly new – AMD has released much lower quality copies before – but these are the best copies to date, being large and clear enough that we can finally make out what most of the various functional units are. Just keep in mind that these die shots are meant for engineering purposes (and appropriated for slide decks) rather than publication purposes as official die shots are; so we’re thankful to have access to them at all.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6210/a...shots-released