Jaguar (microarchitecture)

The AMD Jaguar Family 16h is a low-power microarchitecture designed by AMD. It is used in APUs succeeding the Bobcat Family microarchitecture in 2013 and being succeeded by AMD's Puma architecture in 2014. It is two-way superscalar and capable of out-of-order execution. It is used in AMD's Semi-Custom Business Unit as a design for custom processors and is used by AMD in four product families: Kabini aimed at notebooks and mini PCs, Temash aimed at tablets, Kyoto aimed at micro-servers, and the G-Series aimed at embedded applications. Both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One use SoCs based on the Jaguar microarchitecture, with more powerful GPUs than AMD sells in its own commercially available Jaguar APUs.

Design

A die shot of a Jaguar processor used in a Playstation 4 Pro
  • 32 KiB instruction + 32 KiB data L1 cache per core, L1 cache includes parity error detection
  • 16-way, 1–2 MiB unified L2 cache shared by two or four cores, L2 cache is protected from errors by the use of error correcting code
  • Out-of-order execution and speculative execution
  • Integrated memory controller
  • Two-way integer execution
  • Two-way 128-bit wide floating-point and packed integer execution
  • Integer hardware divider
  • Consumer processors support two DDR3L DIMMs in one channel at frequencies up to 1600 MHz
  • Server processors support two DDR3 DIMMs in one channel at frequencies up to 1600 MHz with ECC
  • As a SoC (not just an APU) it integrates Fusion controller hub
  • Jaguar does not feature clustered multi-thread (CMT), meaning that execution resources are not shared between cores

Instruction-set support

The Jaguar core has support for the following instruction sets and instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4a, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, F16C, CLMUL, AES, BMI1, MOVBE (Move Big-Endian instruction), XSAVE/XSAVEOPT, ABM (POPCNT/LZCNT), and AMD-V.

Improvements over Bobcat

Features

Processors

Consoles

Desktop

SoCs using Socket AM1:

Desktop/Mobile (28 nm)

Server

Opteron X1100-series "Kyoto" (28 nm)

Opteron X2100-series "Kyoto" (28 nm)

Embedded

Jaguar derivative and successor

In 2017, a derivative of the Jaguar microarchitecture was announced in the APU of Microsoft's Xbox One X (Project Scorpio) revision to the Xbox One. The Project Scorpio APU is described as a 'customized' derivative of the Jaguar microarchitecture, utilizing eight cores clocked at 2.3 GHz.

The Puma successor to Jaguar was released in 2014 and targeting entry level notebooks and tablets.

References

Uses material from the Wikipedia article Jaguar (microarchitecture), released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.