Introduction

RMD hasn't been very active in their release of new processors of late. They've mostly been riding on the success of their previous processors, such as the Prashon, Izzudon and Azlon processors, and differentiating them with different configurations. However, RMD's back to extend their lead over their competitors with the introduction of their new Gunalon processor. The Gunalon is a next generation processor based on their next generation architecture code-named Maysad. What this architecture brings with it is an extension of features over its predecessors.

We received an evaluation version of the Gunalon just recently, and quickly analyzed it to see what promise it holds.

Specifications

- 0.01u technology with silver interconnects
- low voltage and power consumption, cooler operation
- superscalar 16 issue execution unit made up of 4 IPUs, 4 FPUs, 4 GPUs and 4 IOUs
- 24 stage advanced polymorphing pipeline with advanced branch prediction, predication and meditation.
- currently sampling at 5.5GHz

Compatibility

The Gunalon is backwards compatible with all Prashon, Izzudon and Azlon processors, as the basic ISA remains the same. However, it extends its traditional instruction set by adding 133 multimedia instructions, dubbed 4GNow! 4GNow dramatically improves multimedia, 3D and 4D performance by accelerating the vector transform propagations that are so intensive in these applications.

Connection

Slot-G is the new connector that Gunalon brings with it. All future RMD processors will support this interface. This is a radical departure from the current Socket450 interface, which has only 450 pins. The Slot-G interface will instead have over 5000 pins between the CPU and the package, and of these, over 2000 of them will directly communicate with the motherboard chipset via Slot-G.

Conclusion

While we do not know the actual performance of the Gunalon processor, our internal lab tests show that it at least matches the current performance of the fastest Azlon processor, and blows it away in multimedia applications, and what we have is just an evaluation version that is not even in the beta stage of production yet. The Gunalon shows a lot of promise indeed if RMD could manage to bring it out in a timely fashion.

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