AMD has revealed at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) that they will implement a new technology in their coming Piledriver cores, the successor to Bulldozer. The resonant clock mesh technology, developed by Cyclos Semiconductor, reduces power consumption by 10% or allows an increase of clock frequency without increasing TDP.
The resonant clock mesh uses on chip inductors in parallel to the clock mesh to create an electronic pendulum or 'tank circuit', this allows it to 'recycle' clock power instead of dissipating it on each clock cycle giving a total power reduction of 10%.
Samuel Naffziger of AMD stated:
“We were able to seamlessly integrate the Cyclos IP into our existing clock mesh design process so there was no risk to our development schedule. Silicon results met our power reduction expectations, we incurred no increase in silicon area, and we were able to use our standard manufacturing process, so the investment and risk in adopting resonant clock mesh technology was well worth it as all of our customers are clamoring for more energy efficient processor designs,”
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