AMD Ryzen Die Shot and New Architecture Details Revealed at ISSCC

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference held earlier this month, some solid information has come to surface on a subject near and dear to many enthusiast hearts right now: AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPU line. As far as credibility, the information comes in fairly convincing form. AMD's claims are backed with die shots of actual AMD Ryzen cores and further supported by more shots of their CCX (core complex) modules. From these shots, we can guess at several things, and further more see evidence for several of their claims.To get to the meat of the matter, let's start with a die shot of a single AMD Ryzen core.The main thing to notice here is of course the fact that each core has only one integer and FPU section, rather than splitting an FPU between two integer units. This represents a major design departure from earlier designs by AMD such as Bulldozer, Piledriver, etc, but is not entirely a surprise as Ryzen has been known (or at the very least, strongly suspected) to utilize such a config for quite some time now.