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

• 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

• Over 10% increase in clock frequency
• Over 15% improvement in instructions per clock (IPC)
• Added support for SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, CLMUL, MOVBE, AVX, F16C, BMI1
• Up to four CPU cores
• L2 cache is shared between cores
• FPU datapath width increased to 128-bit
• Added hardware integer divider
• Enhanced cache prefetchers
• Doubled bandwidth of load–store units
• C6 and CC6 low power states with lower entry and exit latency
• Smaller, 3.1 mm² area per core
• Integrated Fusion controller hub (FCH)
• Video Coding Engine

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